Fiber in Animal Nutrition

Fiber in Poultry Nutrition 48 changes in this stage are governed by weight and not by age. Therefore the onset of the laying period can just happen if the birds weight is right. If they do not grow well in the pullet stage the onset of the laying period will be delayed. Especially for the breeds that are known to have problems with the feed intake and weight gain insoluble CFCs could be an option. 3.5.3.2 Performance in layers There are many trials available that show positive impact of insoluble CFC on perfor- mance.The well researched positive impact of fibrillated insoluble CFCon protein digestion might cause this positive impact. Lim et al. (2013) evaluated the effect of an insoluble CFC on the performance of layers.They used 144Dekalb layers (19 weeks of age) and allocated them randomly to a control feed or a trial feed (0.8% CFC on top). Each diet had six replications with 12 layers per replication. Results of the study showed that feeding a diet with insoluble crude fiber concentrates significantly (p<0.05) increased egg production by 3.43%, which was related to better ef f iciency of feed utilization (p<0.05). The results are shown in table 23.The authors did some economical calculations as well. The use of the insoluble CFC increased the income over feed cost as well as the net benefit significantly. During Control CFC (mixed fiber) CFC (insoluble fiber)* Weight (g) Live weight 1419.3 a 1485.9 a,b 1580.0 b Liver 30.5 a 29.8 a 37.1 b Gizzard 30.2 a 32.2 a,b 39.4 b Small intestine 23.8 a 23.4 a,b 28.3 b Parameter Control Control + CFC (0.8 %) Probability Egg production (%) 83.51 ± 1.10 86.94 ± 0.59 0.02 Feed intake (g)/day 102.74 ± 1.29 102.02 ± 1.98 0.78 Feed conversion ratio 1.835 ± 0.09 1.56 ± 0.05 0.02 Egg weight (g) 54.81 ± 0.40 54.29 ± 0.51 0.43 Egg mass (g) 46.78 ± 0.60 48.065 ± 0.37 0.10 Livability (%) 97.22 ± 0.60 100 ± 0.00 0.34 Table 22: Weight gain and organ weights as influenced by different fiber sources in Hy-Line pullets (Yokhana et al., 2014) *Arbocel a, b different superscript letters in a row indicate significant differences between means (p<0.05) Table 23: Impact of an insoluble CFC on the performance of layers in the first 16 weeks of lay (Lim et al., 2013) *Arbocel © ERLING Verlag