Effect of Dietary Ginger Powder Levels on Growth and Production Performance of Broiler Chickens

Abstract

The authors have assessed the impact of various concentrations of ginger powder (Zingiber officinale) in diets on the growth and production efficiency of broiler chickens. Four dietary treatments were designed, T1 (control, 0% ginger), T2 (0.5% ginger), T3 (1.0% ginger), and T4 (1.5% ginger), were randomly allocated 120 day-old Cobb-500 chicks in total, three replicates of 10 each. The birds were kept at the state of 42 days under normal management conditions. Growth performance parameters like body weight, body weight gain, and average daily gain (ADG) were recorded on weekly basis and production performance parameters like feed intake, feed ratio (FCR) and mortality rate were also recorded. The findings revealed that diet supplementation of ginger powder increased growth and production performance and that, birds fed 1.0% ginger powder (T3) recorded the highest final body weight (2250.8 ± 30.2 g), total body weight gain (2208.6 ± 29.8 g), and optimal FCR (1.70 ± 0.02). Ginger supplemented groups had a minor increase in feed intake and lower mortality than the control. Birds fed more ginger (1.5%) or less (0.5%) were also found to have improvements yet they were not as effective as 1.0% inclusion. To sum up, Ginger 1.0% powder supplementation to the broiler diets improved both growth performance and feed ratio, reduced mortality, which indicates that ginger has the potential to be used as a natural substitute to antibiotic growth promoters in production of broilers.