Validation of infrared moisture meter to determine moisture contents of poultry litter materials

Abstract

Quick and user-friendly methods are important for testing the poultry litter moisture levels at farm level. The objective o f the present study was to determine the suitability o f the Infrared Moisture Meter (IMM) to test the moisture contents o f two types ofpoultry litters. Three week-old broilers (n=150) were put in to six deep litter cages. Three groups o f chicks were reared on paddy husk (PH) based litter while the remaining three groups were raised on refused tea based (RT) litter. Three samples were taken from each cage at weekly intervals for three weeks. Each sample was sub-divided into two sub-samples. The moisture content o f one sub-sample was determined by gravimetric method (GMM) while the moisture content o f the other sub-sample was determined by IMM (OSK 13804; Ogawa Seiki, Co Ltd). Depending on the moisture content o f the sample, time taken to determine the moisture content o f a sample by IMM ranged from 20 to 45 minutes (mean 30 minutes). The moisture contents o f the RT based litter were 50.3±5% and 49.9±9% when measured by GMM and IMM, respectively. The moisture contents o f PH based litter were 41.0±5.7% and 40.9±8% when measured by GMM and IMM method, respectively. On both occasions, there was no significant difference between the moisture content as determined by the two methods (p=0.91). However, on both occasions, the moisture content determined by GMM was higher than that determined by IMM. When the moisture contents o f the litter were compared irrespective o f the litter material, two methods gave very similar values; 45.71±7.2% by GMM and 45.32±9.7% by IMM. The results o f this experiment suggest that IMM method could be successfully used as a tool to determine the poultry litter moisture content.