Digestibility trials with poultry: VII. The digestibility of wheat offals, with a note on the apparent discrepancy between the digestibility coefficients and nutritive values of these products

Extract

1. Digestibility determinations of broad bran, straight-run middlings and fine middlings are here reported.

2. On the basis of these determinations bran would appear to be a relatively dear feeding stuff for use with poultry, as compared with the finer grades of milling offals.

3. In the case of chick feeding mixtures, the finer milling offals suffer from the disadvantage of causing pasting in the mouth, this disadvantage militating against their too extensive inclusion in chick feeding mixtures. From the evidence obtained in these experiments it would appear that this disadvantage would come into play when more than 40 per cent of the total mixture consists of the finer offals.

4. From the point of view of economy and efficiency of utilization, a mixture of bran and middlings would appear to be of more value than either of these foods fed separately.

5. The inclusion of bran in chick feeding mixtures would appear to be justified on dietetic grounds, in spite of its relatively poor value measured by digestibility trials.

6. From a biological standpoint, bran and bran-weatings mixtures appear to be definitely superior to wheat itself when used exclusively as a source of food and supplemented with 1·5 per cent cod-liver oil and 2 per cent oyster shell.