S UMMERS et al. (1967) reported that commercial steam pelleting resulted in enhanced utilization of dietary phosphorus from plant origin when fed to young growing chickens. Considering the relatively high level of phytin or organic phosphorus present in most poultry diets and the fact that a large percentage of poultry feed is being steam pelleted the economic importance of such a finding is readily apparent. For the laying hen phosphorus from plant origin is usually considered to be around 50% available. However, from a review of the work of Singsen et al. (1962), Temperton and Cassidy (1964), Waldroup et al. (1965Waldroup et al. ( , 1967 and Nelson (1967) it is apparent that there are a number of factors influencing the availability of plant phosphorus and that there is lack of agreement as to how much can be utilized by poultry.The present work was undertaken to study the influence of steam pelleting on the utilization of phytin phosphorus by the laying hen. At the same time an attempt was made to gain information on the value of phytin or plant phosphorus in meeting the laying hens requirement for egg production purposes.
MATERIALS AND METHODSIn experiment 1 White Leghorn strain cross pullets that had been reared on regular starting and growing diets were used. These birds were placed in 8 inch laying cages at 18 weeks of age. After the pullets were in production for approximately 6 weeks (29 weeks of age) they were weighed and production to-date assessed. The pullets were allocated into groups of 6 and housed in individual cages. They were arranged so that body weight and egg production were distributed evenly throughout the experiment. Five such groups were then placed on each of the experimental treatments with the 6 birds in each replicate having a common feed trough. The basal diet used is shown in Table 1 (diet 1). This diet served as a control and contained 0.25% of calculated available phosphorus. Gillis et al. (1953) reported that phytin phosphorus was approximately 50% available to the laying hen and on the basis of this report most nutritionists have used a value of 50% of the total phosphorus present in plant sources as being available to the laying hen. Throughout the manuscript, unless otherwise stated, available phosphorus refers to 50% of the phosphorus present in plant material and 100% of that present in calcium phosphate. Further treatments consisted of the addition of 0.16 and 0.32% of phosphorus from a commercial calcium phosphate 1 supplement to the basal diet. Alterations were made in the levels of limestone and kaolin in order to keep all diets equal in calcium. All diets were fed in the form of mash, however, for one series of diets the bran portion was steam pelleted and reground before being mixed with the other ingredients. The duration of the experiment was 10, 28 day periods. Feed consumption was recorded at the end of