Introduction
Pelleting and crumbling copra meal (CM) increased
body weight and gizzard size of birds (Sundu et al.,
2005). A possible reason for the positive effect of
crumbling is increased feed intake (Callet, 1965; Choi et
al., 1986) possibly due to increased bulk density of the
crumbled CM based diets to 0.67 g/cm3 compared to
0.53 g/cm3 for the unpelleted CM based diets (Sundu et
al., 2005). The greater development of the gizzard could
have been due to the increased total feed intake and
increased bulk density.
The inclusion of enzymes in a 300 g kg-1 CM diet has
been found to increase the body weights of birds kept for
45 days so that they were not significantly different from
the weight of birds fed a corn/soy control diet (Sundu et
al., 2005). Gizzard size of the birds fed 300 g kg-1 CM with
enzymes was decreased by 28 %. This may indicate that
enzymes worked well, particularly in the gizzard of birds
fed CM base diets. The following experiment was
designed to test the ideal ratio between fine and coarse
crumbled CM and the interaction of enzymes with the
different proportion of crumbled CM on broiler growth
and gastrointestinal development.