Laying performance and egg qualities characteristics of Japanese quail (<i>Coturnix coturnix japonica</i>) fed natural propriety premix based diets

Abstract

Laying performance and egg qualities characteristics of Japanese quail was understudied to investigate the relative efficacy of two natural proprietary vitamin-mineral premixes. Four diets,were formulated with three different vitamin mineral premixes; T1 (commercial
premix), T2 DietPro (natural premix), T3 DietMix (natural premix) and T4 without premix (control). One hundred and thirty two 42 day-old female quails were randomly divided into 4 treatments with 3 replicates and 11 birds per replicate. The experimental diets and water were offered to the respective birds ad libitum. The design of the experiment was a completely randomized design. There were significant differences (P< 0.05) for numbers of egg per bird per week and hen day egg production which were higher in treatment T1, T2 and T3 but least in T4 T1 had significantly higher feed intake(31.01g) than birds on treatment T2, T3 and T4 (30.10, 29.03 and 29.19). Percent cracked eggs of the treatments differed significantly (P<0.05). Highest broken egg (17.84%) was observed in T4 (without premix) while the least (1.76%) was observed in T3. Mortality was significantly higher in T4 (64.00%) while T1 and T3 had the lower mortality 3.00% respectively. There were also significantly higher values for the internal and external egg quality traits (egg weight, egg width, yolk index, Haugh unit, albumen height, albumen %, and yolk width) in T1, T2 and T3 compare to T4(10.00, 2.11, 0.17, 75.42, 1.55, 49.01and 37.3,).

Key words: Egg quality, Japanese quail, laying characteristics, proprietary premix