Feeding Value of Safflower Meal

Abstract

Recently safflower meal has become an important feed ingredient in this country. It has been used mainly for dairy and beef cattle rations, because much safflower meal is made from unhulled seed. With the advent of the laboratory processed decorticated safflower meals, nutritional tests were needed to evaluate its use for poultry rations.
Criteria used were growth, feed efficiency, pancreas weight, metabolizable energy value and protein digestibility. Rockhorn cockerels (White Leghorn×Plymouth Rock) were distributed to groups of 15 birds each. The experimental diets were fed to 10 day old chicks for 2 weeks. All of the protein in the diets were supplied by either the fish meal, the sufflower meal, the soybean meal or the combination of each of them.
The results obtained were as follows.
1. The diet with all of the protein from a high-protein sufflower meal gave 70% of the gain of the control on fish meal and feed efficiency of the chicks were considerably lower.
2. The addition of lysine resulted in improvement in gain and feed conversion, but the addition of methionine had little beneficial effect.
3. Decorticated safflower meal was low in essential amino acid lysine and for chicks these lacks were made good by fish meal.
4. The metabolizable energy values for various samples of safflower meal showed step-wise decrease as the crude fiber content of the meals increased. The metabolizable energy value of the decorticated meal containing 49% protein was 1.86Kcal/g and it was considerably lower than that of 45% protein soybean meal.
5. Apparent protein digestibility for various samples of safflower meals ranged from 79% to 85%.