The effect of a plant mixture (garlic, mint and rosemary) on production and slaughter indicators in broiler chickens

www.afc.kg.ac.rs The effect of a plant mixture (garlic, mint and rosemary) on production and slaughter indicators in broiler chickens Veselin Petričević1*, Miloš Lukić1, Zdenka Škrbić1, Maja Petričević1, Snežana Bogosavljević-Bošković2, Vladimir Dosković2, Simeon Rakonjac2 1Institute for Animal Husbandry, Autoput 16, 11080, Belgrade–Zemun, Republic of Serbia 2Faculty of Agronomy in Čačak, University of Kragujevac, Čacak, Republic of Serbia *Corresponding author: veselin5@live.com Received 10 October 2020; Accepted 19 November 2020 A B S T R A C T The study objective was to examine the effect of the addition of different concentrations of a mixture of three plants (garlic, mint and rosemary) in the diet of broiler chickens on production and slaughter results. The mixture was formed by grinding plants after drying and mixing them in a ratio of 1: 1: 1. The experiment was performed on 600 chickens divided into 4 groups with 3 replicates per group. The chickens were fed at will and the composition of the diet differed only in the amount of added mixture. No mixture was added in control group (C). Group MIX-I chickens consumed a diet supplemented with 0.25% of the mixture, group MIX-II diet contained 0.5% of the mixture supplement, while group MIX-III broilers received 0.75% of the mixture in their diet. At the end of the experimental period, at the age of 42 days, the body weight of the chickens was measured. Mortality, feed conversion and EPEF were determined. At the end of the experiment, 12 chickens (6 males and 6 females) were sacrificed by random sampling from each group in order to determine slaughter results. The obtained results showed that the use of the mixture of three plants had a positive effect on the production parameters. MIX-II group chickens had significantly higher (p<0.01) body weights, better feed conversion and significantly higher (p<0.01) EPEF values compared with C group. No significant differences in slaughter performances were found.