Value of Supplementary Methionine for Turkey Diets

Abstract

A GOOD deal of experimental evidence is available indicating that diets for poults are improved with supplementary methionine (Bird et al., 1948; Slinger et al., 1949; Saxena and McGinnis, 1952; Peterson and Lampman, 1953; Slinger et al., 1953; and others). These experiments have dealt with the early growing period and no literature appears to be available on the effect of methionine in turkeys carried through to relatively mature weights. The present experiment was designed to study the effect of methionine supplementation of turkey diets from hatching through 24 weeks of age. EXPERIMENTALThe experiment was comprised of 8 groups of Broad Breasted Bronze poults. The birds were vent-sexed at 1 day of age and randomized into the various experimental pens so that each group contained 29 males and 28 females. Duplicate groups were fed the basal diets shown in Table 1, or these diets supplemented with methionine,* from hatching through …