Nutritional Management of Broiler Rearing Farms in Guilan, Iran

From a total of 656 broiler farms with the permission of exploitation in Guilan province, data was gathered from 20% of active farms including 85 units (Capacity of over 1663000 portions of broiler chickens) to evaluate the management of nutrition and nourish using questionnaire. The questionnaires were completed by the interview method. The methods of making feed, feed formulation, the shape of grain, the frequency of feeding, the type of dietary supplement and food additives, the use of experts, feed conversion ratio, causes of mortality, the age of mortality, drinking and feeding systems, and how to use fine nourishing (in the shape of supplement or concentrate) were considered in this study. The performance was calculated for each broiler farm. According to the production index, the farms were divided into three groups of weak (200+25), medium (250+25), and good (300+25) and their differences were compared. According to the results, among the managerial factors, the factors such as: feeding system, water quality, the conformity of ration in nutrition with the needs of commercial strains and drinking management, have the most portion in creating the three groups of good, medium and weak, among the broiler rearing farms. Thus, in the study of each group’s feeding system, the good group has the highest percentage of using automatic systems (86/60) and the weak group has the highest percentage of using manual systems. In comparing three groups regarding the drinking water quality, it was observed that good, medium and weak groups drink 92%, 61.84%, and 75% fresh water, respectively. Furthermore, in the weak group, most of the farms have used the water with tolerable hardness or saltiness. Finally, the conformity of strain’s requirement with diet was examined among groups. The results showed that 16.5% of units followed this conformity and the percentages of the good, medium, weak groups was 11.12%, 28%, 53.5%, respectively.