Performance of growing quails fed electron beam irradiated soybean or canola seeds

Among oilseeds, soybean and canola seeds are widespread used in poultry diets (Baker and Chang 1992), however their use in poultry diet is limited because of anti-nutritional factors (Zeb 1998, Syddhuraju et al. 2002). Different methods have been used for improwing nutritional value of oilseeds. One of these methods is irradiation (Taghinejad-Rudboneh et al 2010, Ebrahimi-Mahmoudabad and Taghinejad-Roudbaneh 2011). Electron beam irradiation (EB) is a physical method that can improve the nutritional valueof feedstuff and has been considered recently. Advantages of processing with EB-irradiation is no damage to feeds, lack of production of non-digestible products, increase digestibility of crude protein without side effects on feeds (Majd and Ardekani 2003, Anwar et al. 2015). Therefore, present study was carried out in two separate experiments in order to investigate the effect of feeding EB-irradiated soybean and canola seeds on growing performance of Japanese quail chicks
Soybean and canola seeds were irradiated with EB at doses of 5, 10 and 15 kGy. Japanese quails were purchased and transferred to the farm. All chickens were weighed and were assigned randomly to experimental units. In each experimental unit, 14 birds of different sexes (male and female) were placed so that the average body weight was the same in each experimental unit. Diets formulated on corn and soybean meal based diets according to NRC (1994). Ingredients and chemical composition of diet of quail chicks containing soybean seed or canola seed is shown in Table 1. Quails were fed with experimental diets for 36 days in a completely randomized design with 4 treatments and 4 replications and 14 chicks per each replicate in two separate experiments. Quails were fed on corn-soybean meal diet. In first experiment, 12% untreated or irradiated soybean was used in diet and in second experiment, 8% untreated and irradiated canola seed was used in diet. Feed intake, feed conversion ratio (FCR), average daily gain (ADG), protein efficiency ratio and European production efficiency factor were calculated at the end of the experiments. All birds were slaughtered at the end of the growing period. Then, weights of edible carcass, breast t, thigh t, bursa of fabricius and gastrointestinal tract were measured.
Feeding irradiated soybean seed significantly improved (P0.05). Gharghani et al (2008) reported that feeding canola meal treated with gamma irradiation had no significant effect on dressing percentage of broiler chickens. Given that feeding of diets containing irradiated soybean or canola seeds had no effect on live wieght, so no irradiation impact on carcass characteristics with the use of irradiated soybean or canola seeds treated is reasonable.
Results of the present study demonstrated that feeding EB-irradiated soybean improved performance of quails. However, feeding EB-irradiated canola seed had not significant effect on performance of quails.