Discipline: Animal Science
This study was conducted to find out the influence of beneficial micro organisms as probiotics drinks in the performance of brooding native chicken. The probiotic drinks were mixed in the daily water requirements of chicks during 21 days of the brooding period. The 100 day-old chicks were assigned in Randomized Complete Block Design with 5 treatments and 4 replications. The result of the study reveals no significant differences among treatments in terms of final live-weight, and survival rate of birds. Furthermore, the study also reveals that without antibiotics, the brooder chicks have a good chance of survival, which is statistically comparable with those birds given with antibiotics and / or with probiotics drinks. In other parameters like the gain in weight, feed consumption, and feed conversion ratio, the results reveal significant differences among treatments means during 21 days of brooding. Further analysis using Least Significant Differences test, reveals that birds given pure water only, antibiotic with vitamins, indigenous micro organism serum, and fermented pineapple juice, were comparable. The finding reveals that pure water was enough to influence favorably the growth performance of chicks with good survival rate during 21 days of brooding native chicken.