Soybean hulls in the quail diet

Soybean hulls are a byproduct resulting from the soybean processing industry; However it has high fiber content, there are some evidences that quails can digest more fibrous ingredients compared to hens. Thus, this study aimed to evaluate the digestibility and the effects of different levels of soybean hulls on performance, egg quality, gastrointestinal organs weight and serum cholesterol and triglycerides levels of quails. For this, two experiments were conducted. On the first experiment, a digestibility assay was conducted, using 120 male quails at 30 days of age randomly assigned in two treatments: reference diet and test diet (partial replacement of reference with 20% of soybean hulls) with 10 replications and six birds per experimental unit. On the second experiment, two hundred eighty female quails at 150 days of age were randomly assigned in five levels of soybean hulls inclusion: 0; 5; 10; 15 e 20%, seven replications and eight birds per experimental unit. The apparent metabolizable energy (AME) and nitrogen-corrected apparent metabolizable energy (AMEn) and respective metabolizability coefficients were determined to be 1,844.47 and 1,783.81 kcal/kg of dry matter basis, 49.53 and 46.64%, respectively. The soybean hulls inclusion did not affect the performance, egg quality, serum cholesterol and triglycerides. Among the gastrointestinal organs, the inclusion of soybean hulls affected only the pancreas. These results suggest that quail can be included in the quail diets until the level of 20%.