Applied Animal Nutrition-I

Comparative feeding trials

COMPARATIVE FEEDING TRAILS

• It is the simplest form of feeding trial.
• Two or more rations may be compared with each other on this basis.
• Additional records as to the feed eaten, provide a comparison of the relative amounts of the ration required to produce a unit of product and by the use of cost figures, the results may be put on a money basis.
• The records here obtained tell us  nothing as to why one ration proved better than another, unless the poorer one was so unpalatable as to be little consumed or unless it caused absolute harm.
• As a further step of interest of more specific information, individual feeds may be compared as a part of rations, wherein the other ingredients are held constant.
• An example to show soyameal is better protein than Groundnut cake for broilers

Rations	Body weight at 6 wks	Feed consumed in 6 weks
Ration 1
150 kg Soyabean meal	2.0 kg	4.0 kg
Ration 2
150 kg Groundnut cake	1.8 kg	4.4 kg

Note: This experiment tells us that comparitively, Soyabean meal diet was better than groundnut oil cake diet. But it tells nothing as to why the Soyabean meal was better. Was it due to better quality protein? or the presence of higher lysine? etc. which cannot be foundout by just comparison.

• In case of two rations, ‘t’ test is used while in case of three or more rations analysis of variance test is applied to analyse the data like feed consumed per day, average daily gain (ADG), feed consumed per kg gain (feed efficiency) etc for statistical significance.