Significance of Cafeteria Food Leftover as Alternative Cheap Feed Resource in Poultry Nutrition by Alleviating its Pollution Effect on the Environment

To combat undernutrtion in Sub-Sahara Africa, it is essential to maximize animal products by replacing expensive conventional feeds with those of cheap unconventional. The current study was conducted to evaluate the impact of feeding dried cafeteria food leftover (DCFL) as a partial replacement of the expensive maize on growth performances and carcass characteristics of broiler chickens. The DCFL was mixed with other feed ingredients as a replacement of maize at 0% (control diet, T1), 5% (T2), 10% (T3), and 15% (T4). After two weeks of brooding, one hundred sixty unsexed broiler chickens were randomly allocated into four treatment diets with four replicates of 10 chicks each. Feed consumption and body weight were measured on daily and weekly basis, respectively. At the end of the feeding trial, two birds (one male and female) were used to evaluate the carcass components. The daily feed consumption (g/chicken) was 108, 109, 110, and 110 for T1, T2, T3, and T4 diets, respectively. Chickens reared on control diet had the lower (p<0.05) final body weight (1790g) than those of T2 (1834g), T3 (1867g) and T4 (1914g) and differed (p<0.05) from each other. The lowest feed conversion ratio (kg feed/kg weight gain) was recorded with chickens fed on T4 (2.77) as compared to those reared on T1 (2.93), T2 (2.89), and T3 diets (2.85) and differed (p<0.05) from each other. Male chickens had (p<0.05) higher values for all carcass components than females except for wings. Chickens fed with T4 had higher (p<0.05) breast meat, thighs, drumsticks, and keel bone meat values than those of T1. Chickens fed on T4 had higher (p<0.05) thighs, and drumsticks than those of T1, T2 and T3 diets. The highest dressing percentage was observed in chickens reared in T4 (68.1%) followed by T3 (66.8%) and differed (p<0.05) from those of T2 (64.2%) and T1 (63.7%). In conclusion, the DCFL can be safely included up to 15% in the broiler diets by replacing maize grain in smallholder poultry settings for improved and sustainable food security of the poor community.

Keywords: broiler chickens; cafeteria food leftover; carcass components; consumption; growth performances.