The Availability of Phosphorus from Different Sources for Poults Fed Purified Diets

A NUMBER of investigators (Gerry et al., 1947; Grau and Zweigart, 1953; Miller and Joukovsky, 1953; and others) have studied the availability of the phosphorus supplied by various supplements to chick diets in which common feed ingredients were used. Gillis and associates (1948 (1954) made use of both practical diets and purified diets to evaluate the phosphorus supplements more critically than had been done previously. The results of these investigations have shown steamed bone meal, dicalcium phosphates, defluorinated phosphates and certain other phosphates to be satisfactory as phosphorus supplements to chick diets. Since availability studies of this nature using poults and poult starting diets have not been reported, the following experiments were performed. Day-old Beltsville Small White (BSW) poults from the college breeding flock were sexed by means of an optical device, wing-banded, weighed and distributed equally into electrically heated batteries where they had free access to water and …