Azolla: Nutritionally Rich Non-Conventional Feed for Backyard Poultry Farming

The major cost of production in poultry farming is towards the feed cost. It shares around 80 per cent of total cost of production incurred during the poultry rearing. In order to reduce the cost of production, low cost feed formulation by using locally available feeds is the need of the hour. In this regard the present study was conducted to analyze the effect of feeding azolla on the performance of backyard poultry farming. For this one week old 30 chicks of Swarnadhara were selected for each group and 3 such groups were made. The first group (T1- control) was fed with the only recommended Desi starter feed (commercial feed), second group(T2) was fed with wet azolla by replacing 30% of desi starter and the third group(T3) was fed with the dry azolla by replacing 30% of the desi starter. After the 21 days feeding trial, it was found that the weight gain of second and third trial was at par with the control group indicating the azolla can be used as a partial substitute to the desi feed which is used by the farmers to feed the chicks at early stage. By this way the feeding cost can be reduced by 30 per cent, which directly will be added to the total profit gain.