Effects of food intake, soaking time, enzyme and cornflour addition on the digestibility of the diet and performance of broilers given wet food

Abstract

1. Four experiments were carried out to investigate the effects on growth, food conversion efficiency (FCE) and apparent diet digestibility, of wetting food before offering it to individually caged growing chickens. 2. Female broiler chicks (8/treatment) were given grower food ad libitum from 28-49 d of age either in the dry form or wetted with 2.0 kg water/kg air dry food, or wet food restricted to the same daily amount of dry matter as eaten by the dry-fed birds. Ad libitum feeding of the wet food significantly increased food intake and body weight gain, compared to dry feeding, while weight gains of birds with restricted feeding of wet food were intermediate. 3. Experiments 2 and 3 studied the effects of the time interval between mixing the food with water and offering it to the birds. When pre-soaking times of 0, 12 and 24 h were compared with dry food for male broilers (8/treatment) from 25 to 40 d all wet treatments increased body weight gains significantly, the best results coming from the zero soaking time, when DM digestibility was increased significantly from 677 to 714 g/kg. When restricted amounts of food were offered hourly for 8 h on each of 4 d, DM digestibility was significantly increased from 634 for dry food to 659 for that freshly mixed with water and 664 g/kg for that soaked for 1 h between mixing and offering. 4. In a factorial experiment with wet and dry food, either in the standard form or with added enzyme or 400 g/kg cornflour, there were significant positive effects on growth and FCE of broilers (7/treatment) attributable to enzyme and wetting, while cornflour significantly reduced growth. However, wet cornflour-diluted food gave better growth than dry standard food. Wetting significantly increased the apparent digestibility of dry matter and protein while dilution with cornflour significantly reduced protein digestibility. 5. These results confirm those previously presented in terms of improved growth and FCE with wet feeding and demonstrate a large improvement in the proportion of the food absorbed from the digestive tract, of similar magnitude to the improvement in FCE. They also show that it is not necessary to pre-soak food in order to attain the maximum effect.

Effect of liquid feeding at different water-to-feed ratios on the growth performance of growing-finishing pigs

“…The lack of differences observed in the previous work may be because diets were offered ad libitum rather than as a restricted ration. While the present study shows improved performance with liquid feeding there was little difference between the water-to-feed ratios, suggesting the exact amount of water may not be critical in achieving better utilisation, a view supported by Yalda and Forbes (1996). The ADG of pigs offered FLF has been demonstrated to be approximately 13% higher than that found with NFLF (Jensen and Mikkelsen, 1998;Dung et al, 2005), and that pigs reared on liquid feed acidified with lactic acid perform similarly to those animals offered FLF (Geary et al, 1999).…”

Impact of wet feeding wheat-based diets with or without enzyme on broiler chick performance

“…Forbes and co-workers Yalda and Forbes 1996;Forbes 1999, 2000) have demonstrated consistent improvements in voluntary feed intake and growth rate with wet feeding wheat-based diets. However, there appear to be both positive and negative effects of wet feeding on feed conversion.…”

Feeding value of copra meal for broilers

“…Soaking the diet has been reported to increase the performance of birds (Yalda and Forbes, 1996) through the mechanisms of activation of endogenous enzymes in the ingredients (Forbes, 2003), increase in ingredient solubilisation (Yasar and Forbes, 2000) and increase in bulk density (Sundu et al, 2005a). Sundu et al (2005a) found that soaking the 30% CM based diet, in a ratio 1:1 increased body weight significantly.…”