Improving poultry feed in Papua New Guinea

By JANET PANDI of NARI

Village poultry provides a source of income, improves nutrition and help meet family and social obligations.

Local feed resources can be used more effectively for feeding poultry.

Balanced rations for village birds can be devised from potential feed sources.

Farmers could also introduce new crops and use pasture species with higher nutritional values.

Feeding chicken with commercial feed has been challenging due to rising costs of imported ingredients and feeds.

Alternative feeding strategies are however available.

One approach is to develop concentrate diets for finishing broiler chickens by blending cheap local feed ingredients.

Since 2002, NARI has been working on improving efficiency and productivity of smallholder poultry producers.

One such way is to test locally-available feed materials that can potentially be used as feed ingredient in poultry diets.

A project on poultry feeding system was developed in Lae to establish a quality-assured research facility for Papua New Guinea to determine the quality of poultry feed.

 A variety of feed resources from PNG were tested using this facility.

They included maize, wheat, sorghum, sweet potato, sago, cassava, banana and legume leaves from village crops.

By-products tested were millrun, rice bran, palm kernel meal, copra meal, tuna offal meal and pyrethrum marc.

Potential poultry ingredients with apparent metabolisable energy (AME) values ranging from 12-15 MJ/Kg DM were agro-industrial by-products such as copra meal (15.01 MJ/Kg) and pyrethrum marc (13.63 MJ/Kg)), traditional staples such as cassava (15.87), sago (15.01) and sweet potato (15.39 MJ/Kg) and grains such as wheat (12.76). 

The AME values of palm kernel meal and copra meal at 30% inclusion were 9.05 and 9.86 MJ/Kg respectively.

Growth of birds was measured for seven days in the AME unit and fully evaluated over six-eight weeks in the broiler grow-out facility.

Birds (three weeks of age) fed diets for seven days in the AME unit with low inclusion rates of cassava, sweet potato, palm kernel meal and copra meal performed well.

Copra meal-based diets were superior.

 Evaluation of local feed resources over the full growing period of broilers were also undertaken with diets containing maize, cassava, copra meal, fishmeal and leucaena leaf meal.

 These diets were compared with a commercial ration comprising mainly imported feeds.

 In some trials feed conversion was superior in the commercial ration.

In other trials there was no difference between the commercial or the PNG feed-based diet.

Based on this, an alternative feeding strategy was developed, involving the development of a high protein poultry concentrate containing fishmeal and copra meal.

The concentrate was fed with up to 70% of high energy sources such maize, sweet potato or cassava. On-station and village feeding trials were conducted to evaluate the concentrate feeding strategy.

Meat birds fed with commercial broiler feed outperformed those fed the concentrate diets but the net income from sale of live birds was only 5% lower for the concentrate sweet potato diet.

 However, the huge demand for live birds may still make it profitable to use local feed resources mixed with a poultry concentrate, particularly in remote areas of PNG.

The  project was extended for another three years with the title ‘Improving profitability of village broiler production in PNG’ and focused on evaluating the economic viability of the concept of using concentrate as an alternative means of reducing broiler finisher feed costs.

The poultry feeding systems project had laid a solid foundation to assist in the development of the smallholder poultry sector in PNG, enabling this project to place a much-stronger focus on delivery of feeding strategies to village farmers through participation of NGO and conduct of on-farm evaluation trials.

Two energy concentrates – high energy and low energy - were developed to be used as mashed mixes with cassava and sweet potato, respectively.

 The tubers are cooked as for human food and mixed thoroughly at about three to one ratio of the boiled tubers with the concentrates and then fed to birds fresh.

As birds need to have unlimited access to the feed, the mixed mash should be prepared twice daily and offered to birds to minimise possible wastage and spoilage.

These best bet feeding options were extensively tested at village level in lowland and highland areas of PNG and were confirmed as appropriate and feasible.

Three NGOs were directly involved in the testing of candidate feeding options and the piloting of best bet feeding options.

 There were the Christian Leaders Training Centre (Banz), Lutheran Development Service (Morobe) and Ok Tedi Development Foundation (Tabubil).

Results from all three sites confirmed findings from the on-station grow-out trial conducted at NARI Labu that birds fed with 50% sweet potato with 50% low energy concentrate and 50% cassava with 50% high energy concentrate diets were able to reach market weight of 2kg or more at 42 days of age. Feed conversion efficiencies of birds on these test diets were similar to results obtained at NARI.

 Growth performance of birds is not affected by form of presentation of sweet potato component of the diet (mashed or milled).

The best bet feeding options were again tested on farm in selected villages through contact via our partners.

The trials were conducted in Madang, Morobe, Eastern Highlands, Western Highlands and Western provinces.

 Overall performance of broilers on the test diets was good, attaining target market of over 2kg from week five of age.

 The sweet potato-based diet compared very well with the commercial control on end weight.

Economic modeling was also done on the use of mini feed mills to process these concentrates and the graph below depicts the projected costs.

 It is profitable to also have mini feedmills using the concentrate concept to minimise production costs.

 Based on this research, it is safe to recommend the two feeding options of using high energy concentrate with cassava and low energy concentrate with sweet potato for poultry feed in areas where these staple crops are in abundance.