Variation in Nutritive Value of Commercial Broiler Diets

The classical energy balance method was used to measure the apparent metabolisable energy (AME) of four batches of broiler starter and finisher diets produced by two commercial feed companies. The results showed there was little variation in protein content between batches, but NDF content varied from 13.3% to 15.5% between batches of diet. The batch variation in chemical composition differed between feed manufacturers. While there was no difference in AME and feed conversion ration (FCR) between batches of starter diets produced by company A, FCR and AME ranged from 1.76-1.94 (p<0.001) and 11.38-11.90 MJ/kg air dry (p<0.05), respectively, for diets produced by company B. Similar results were found in a second experiment. There was no difference in AME, dry matter digestibility (DMD) and FCR between batches for finishing diet produced by company B, but a large variation occurred for the finisher diets from company A (p<0.01), where the ranges of FCR, AME and DMD were 1.95-2.30, 10.5-12.3 (MJ/kg air dry) and 58-68%, respectively. FCR was correlated with AME. AME was negatively related to the content of fibre in the diet, but positively related to DMD. The preliminary results based on 24 samples showed that near infrared spectroscopy (NIR) has the potential to predict FCR, intake, AME and DMD of commercial broiler diets, with $R^2$ being 0.93, 0.89, 0.95 and 0.98, respectively. The standard error of cross validation was below 0.2 for AME and only 0.06 for FCR.