Research Article

Ever since time was young, poultry and agriculture have been part of the lives of the early settlers of the land. They raised farm animals and planted farm plants in their habitats thus becoming the reason why they settled permanently. Poultry-raising became a never-ending tradition, a way of life.

People nowadays, inherited this way of life and created innovative ways of making easy this lucrative yet expensive business. Poultry-raisers are now looking at the problem of increase in the prices of commodities. This upsurge in the prices may indirectly affect the performance of their business.

While agriculturists are looking at this crisis, aqua culturists are on for another problem. The fast rate of production of aquatic macrophytes and the difficulty in remedying such phenomenon affects adversely the life in the freshwater communities wherein we get rich sources of food and water.

Because of these reasons, the researchers formulated a research design to answer the problem of the agriculturists and fresh water fishermen. Two pigs were fed with two different kinds of feeds. The control group was fed with 100% commercial feeds and the other group was fed with 30% water hyacinth, six percent molasses and 64% commercial feeds. The pigs were fed with the two different kinds of feeds for 28 days and their masses were taken every four days. These four days yielded 7 different readings and was applied with statistical treatment. The t-test for uncorrelated means was used to determine if there is a significant difference between the mixture of feeds and the commercial feeds alone. The statistical treatment yielded a not significant value therefore we are to accept the null hypothesis which states that there is no significant difference between the mean mass gains of the pigs fed with the mixed feeds and the mean mass gains of the commercial pigs.

This result lead to a finding that water hyacinth could be used as a substitute for commercial feeds since they don’t have any significant difference in the effect to the mass gains of the pigs. However, this finding may not be conclusive at all since only one pig was used for every group. One pig was used for both the experimental and control group due to financial constraints.

A conclusion was taken from the findings of the study. The pig fed with 30% water hyacinth, six percent molasses and 64% commercial feeds and the pig fed with 100% commercial feeds showed comparable effects to the mass of the pigs. Thus, it could be inferred from this that water hyacinth feeds could therefore be a substitute for meager amounts of commercial feeds in the fodder.

The researchers recommend to the people, especially to small scale hog raisers, to use a mixture of 30% water hyacinth, 60% molasses and 64% commercial feeds in feeding the pigs to help lessen the allotted budget for commercial feeds. Though these hog raisers still use commercial feeds, at least, the commercial feeds to be used will decrease because they are being replaced with the water hyacinth and the molasses. With this plan of action, the use of the water hyacinth feeds could finally help our aqua culturists in their struggle for the control of the propagation of this aquatic macrophyte. With the use of this water plant, the researchers could go back to their aim of controlling this plant which has been considered a very big problem in ponds of aqua culturists, a symbol that what is happening in the water could be of big help to those in the land, thus, a very healthy ecosystem.

It has been mentioned for many times in the previous chapters about the number of subjects the researchers have in one group, the researchers recommend to those other researchers to study more on this concept of feeding water hyacinth feeds and increase the number of subjects to assure the value of the data that is gathered.

Also, the researchers recommend to those who will do a follow-up study to consider different percentages of the fodder. This would also assure a wider range of composition.