Different nutritional recommendations for broilers: performance and economic analysis

The objective of this research was to compare the effect of different nutritional recommendations on the performance and economics of the production of broiler chickens. A total of 1,200 Cobb-500 line male broilers were placed in a completely randomized design with four treatments and 10 replicates, with 30 animals each. The diets in each treatment were as follows: 1. COBB-VANTRESS (2009); 2. Commercial feed; 3. Rostagno et al. (2005); and 4. Rostagno et al. (2011). The following performance traits were evaluated: feed intake (FI), weight gain (WG), body weight (BW), feed conversion (FC) and productive efficiency index (PEI). The experiment ran while chickens were 1 to 21 and 1 to 42 days old. For the economic analysis, the diet cost and live weight price were considered when calculating the average cost of the diet (ADC) and the gross trading margin (TM). Analysis of variance was used to evaluate ADC and TM performance traits; diets means were compared with Tukey’s test. In the 1 to 21 day period, there was a higher FI and less efficient FC with diet 1 and more efficient PEI with diet 4. During the 1 to 42 day period, diets 1, 3 and 4 had the highest BW, WG and PEI. TM and ADC show similar results, i.e., commercial feed being less attractive to producers. For the entire experimental period, the nutritional recommendations of COBB-VANTRESS (2009), Rostagno et al. (2005) and Rostagno et al. (2011) had the highest productive and economic performance for broiler production.