The effect of brewers grains on egg production of chickens

S. W. Yeong and M. Faizah

Abstract

A 52-week layer trial was carried out with 450 25-week-old Hisex Brown pullets to study the effect of dietary brewers grains (BG) on egg laying performance. BG containing 78Vo crude protein was included into isonitrogenous diets from5Ta to30Vo with balanced dietary metabolizable energy ranging from 11.0 to 11.1 MJ/kilogramme. A basal diet without BG was used as a control while three other diets containing 10%, 20% and 30% BG with out energy balance were compared with the isocaloric diets. It was observed that daily feed intakes were comparable among the treatments. There were higher percentage of egg production ranging from 71.3 to 71.9 in the control, 5% and 10% BG based diet group. BG above 10% in the diet irrespective of energy content had an adverse effect on egg production. Lower feed/egg mass ratios were observed in isocaloric 30% BG based diet and diets with 20% and 30% BG without energy balance. However, significantly superior egg albumen quality in terms of Haugh Unit was observed in the last two diets. It was suggested that BG could be included in layer diets up to 10% with metabolizable energy maintained at 11.1 MJ/kg in the diets.

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