The ammonia is a highly irritant gas which cause stress to the birds, leading to weight losses, or even their death. For that reason, there is a great interest on determining the amount of ammonia liberated from the litter, as well as the factors which influence the production of this substance, but most methods require expensive equipment or are relative complex. Therefore, the present work was idealized with the aim of develop and standardize a simple and unexpensive methodology, usefull even at field conditions and capable to determine the amount of ammonia liberated by the litter with good accuracy. The proposed method was based on the microdifusion method and consisted on incubating samples of broiler litter (70 g) into glass container (500 cm³), with another flask (50 cm³) containing 10 cm³ of boric acid solution (2% m/v) on the surface of the incubatted litter. Then, the system is stored and kept for 15 hours at 30°C and, after that, the boric acid solution is titrated against sulfuric acid solution at 0.05 N, with metil orange and bromocresol green.
ammonia determination; broiler litter; methodology
