Supplements for Soybean Meal in Turkey Diets

Abstract

TURKEYS have been reared sucessfully on diets containing small quantities of meat meal and fish meal as supplements to soybean meal by Headley (1944) and by Brant et al. (1944) and on diets containing soybean meal as the only protein supplement by Hammond et al. (1944). However, the ability of various materials to supplement diets high in soybean meal has not been investigated with turkeys as thoroughly as with chickens. The growth of chickens is stimulated by supplementing a diet high in soybean meal with dl-methionine (Bird and Mattingly, 1945), or with combinations of crystalline vitamins including choline (Berry et al. 1943; Bird and Rubin 1946), or, even more effectively, with concentrates of an unknown dietary factor found in cow manure and in animal protein supplements (Whitson et al., 1945; Rubin and Bird, 1946). The experiments reported in this paper were undertaken to determine whether or not turkey poults resembled .