Fiber in Animal Nutrition

45 Performance CFC on the digestibility of amino acids.They could see a significant improvement in the amino acid digestibility by up to 7% due to the use of 0.8%CFC in the feed. In average the CFC improved the digestibility of the essential amino acids by 5.8%. Based on this a matrix walue was calculated for insoluble CFC based on lignocellulose, which enables the feed compounder to reduce the soya bean level in the formulation significantly. This approach has been evaluated byDr. SVRama Rao from Hyderabad, India. In his trials he reduced the soya bean level by 2.55% in the feed formulations for Cobb 400 birds and used 0.7% insoluble lignocellulose based CFC instead. Despite the massive reduction of the protein level no negative impact on any performance parameters was observed in this feeding trial. 3.5.1 Performance in broiler breeders Moradi et al. (2013) conducted a quite interesting trial in broiler breeders to evaluate which kind of fiber is the most beneficial. They divided a total of 120Cobb 500 breeders into 4 groups. All animals were fed with a corn-soy based formulation. The control group received a formulation with 2750 kcal/ kg ME and the trial groups received a diet that had been diluted with different fibrous feed ingredients – cottonseed meal (CSM), pectin (PEC) and an insoluble CFC based on cellulose (CEL). The cotton seed meal and the cellulose formulation were adjusted to an energy content of 2450 kcal. The main results are summarized in table 20. The use of insoluble CFC cellulose led to an increased egg production as well as the number of eggs per hen. This positive impact of insoluble fibers on the performance of broiler breeders has been confirmed by Farran andAkilian (2014).They investigated the impact of an insoluble CFC on selected performance related parameters in breeders. The insoluble CFC was used at 0.8% to replace wheat bran. The experiment was conducted on 26,000 broiler breeders of the Ross 308 strain and 2600 roosters. Table 19: Digestibility data as influenced by an insoluble CFC (Farran, 2011) Protein digestion (%) Fat digestion (%) Treatment Control 57.4 a 83 Insoluble CFC 62.9 b 83.6 Table 20: Impact of different fibrous feed components on the laying performance of breeders (Moradi et al., 2013) Control (2750 kcal) CSM(2450 kcal) PEC soluble CEL (2450 kcal) insoluble Egg production % Week 26–38 73.7 b ± 1.2 73.2 b ± 1.2 71.3 b ± 1.2 79.4 a ± 1.2 No eggs/hen Week 26–38 62.4 b ± 1.8 63.1 b ± 1.8 61.1 b ± 1.8 68.4 a ± 1.8 a, b means within a column with different superscripts differ significantly (p < 0.01) a, b Means not sharing a common superscript letters within a row differ (p<0.05) © ERLING Verlag