Nutritional Evaluation of Soybean Hulls with or without β-Mannanase Supplement on Performance, Intestinal Morphometric and Carcass Yield of Broilers Chickens

ABSTRACT The objective was to evaluate the performance, intestinal morphology and carcass yield of broilers fed corn-soybean meal (SBM) diet or corn-SBM-soybean hull (SH) with or without b-mannanase supplementation. Thousand four hundred and forty Cobb Slow-male- chicks were housed design following a factorial scheme 2 x 2 (corn-SBM diet and corn-SBM-SH diet vs with and without b-mannanase), composing 4 treatments and 9 replicates each treatment, with 40 birds each replicate. At 21 days, corn-SBM diet supplemented with b-mannanase resulted in better (p0.05) in the quality of the poultry litter with the inclusion of the enzyme in the diet. The use of b-mannanase in diets with higher concentration of fiber improves the feed conversion of broilers from 1 to 21 days and can be an important nutritional and economic strategy in situations of unavailability of raw material of better quality. Corn-SBM-SH diet resulted in greater weight gain at 42 days than corn-SBM diet.