Available Biotin Content of Barley

MOST ingredients used in poultry feeds are considered to contain enough biotin so that biotin supplementation of most practical rations is not needed. The National Research Council's Publication 585 (1958) gives the biotin content of barley as 0.08 milligrams per pound or 0.18 micrograms per gram. This would mean that a ration containing 50% or more of barley should contain adequate biotin to meet the chick's requirement of 0.04 milligrams per pound (National Research Council, 1954). In some of the experiments conducted at this station to study the value of certain enzyme preparations in rations with a new variety of hulless barley, a semi-purified type of diet was fed which contained 75% hulless barley and no added crystalline biotin. Chicks fed this diet developed typical biotin deficiency symptoms, similar to those described by Hegsted et al. (1940), within three weeks. The symptoms did not appear when 100 micrograms of biotin …