Egg quality of Banat naked neck hens during storage

Abstract

In less intensive production systems, native poultry breeds can be used in order to diversify the products and achieve self-sustainability of these breeds through production. Given the missing data on the sustainability of quality of eggs obtained from indigenous, native hens, during storage, the aim of the study was to determine the most important parameters of egg quality of indigenous breed of Banat Naked Neck hens during a four-week period in different storage conditions. The design of the experiment was two-factorial with 4 levels of storage time factors (fresh eggs - 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4 weeks of storage) and 2 levels of temperature storage condition factors (room temperature and refrigerator). The room temperature was on average 21.3°C and the refrigerator temperature 8°C. Quality analysis was performed on a total of 200 eggs, and it included following parameters: egg weight, egg weight loss, weight and proportion of structural components: shell, yolk and albumen, albumen height, yolk colour, Haugh Units and albumen pH. The storage time had a significant effect on all properties of egg quality, except for the yolk colour, which was under the impact of the interaction of storage time and temperature. Storage temperature influenced egg weight loss (<0.001), shell weight (<0.05), albumen height (<0.0001), Haugh Units (<0.0001) and albumen pH (<0.0001). By storing in the refrigerator, changes in internal quality were significantly slowed down. After 28 days of storage in the refrigerator, the values of albumen and Haugh Units were higher than the same parameters of eggs stored for only 7 days at room temperature.