Abstract

Castor seeds were subjected to three processing methods (boiling, fermentation and lye treatment) defatted and fed at 10% rate replacing groundnut cake in a 56-day experiment involving 150 day-old Anak 2000 broiler chicks to evaluate growth, consumption, hematological parameters and serum metabolites of the broilers served. There were five dietary treatments: treatment 1 was a control diet, void of castor bean cake (CBC) while treatment 2 to 5 contained raw, boiled, fermented or lye treated CBC. The birds were randomly distributed into five groups with three replicates of ten birds each in a completely randomized design. Birds on control diet had highest feed consumption and weight gained followed by birds on lye treated CBC while feed intake of birds on untreated CBC declined drastically (P<0.05). Feed gain ratio were similar (P>0.05) in control and treated CBC groups but significantly different (P<0.05) from untreated group. The haematological indices (red blood cell, haemoglobin concentration and mean corpuscular measurements) were affected (P<0.05) declining from treated CBC to untreated CBC. There was significant increase (P<0.05) in urea and creatinine levels in untreated CBC while activities of enzymes Alanine transaminase and Aspartate transaminase in the serum of the chickens differ significantly across the treatments (P<0.05). In case of shortages groundnut cake, use of lye treated CBC below10% may be used in broiler’s diet.

Key words: Processing methods, castor bean cake, growth, serum.