Replacement of urea by part of soybean meal in broiler diets

In order to study the effect of urea in broilers diet, an experiment was conducted to compare seven dietary treatments in which urea was substituted for a part of soybean meal. In a completely randomized design, 40 -old broiler chicken (Arian) were divided into groups (replicates). Each replication contained 5 birds and each ditary treatment was assingned to three groups as follow. First group: The birds were given urea during the two and three weeks and during the other weeks they consumed conventional diet. Second group: the bird fed the diet containing urea during the forth and seventh weeks and they were feed conventional diet during the other periods. Third group: The birds were control group which were feed with conventional diet without urea during all the exprimental period. The used diets were isocaloric and isonitrogenous and urea was used at levels of 0.0, 0.406 and 0.609%. The results indicated, using urea in the diets of broiler at mentioned levels had no any significant adverse effect or broiler performance including body weight gain/feed intake, feed conversion ratio decresing percentage and abdominal fat.