The Effect of Calcium Carbonate Particle Size and Solubility on the Utilization of Phosphorus from Phytase for Broilers

Abstract

A twenty-eight day floor pen experiment was carried out using 1680 Cobb-500 male day old chicks to evaluate the impact of feeding different particle sizes of calcium carbonate (CaCO ) on broiler performance 3 and tibia ash. The experiment consisted of 8 treatments with 6 replications per treatment to test 8 different CaCO particle sizes. The corn-soybean meal based diets contained 21.5% CP, 3025 kcal ME kg , 0.78% 3 1 Ca, 0.20% Non-phytate P (NPP) with 500 FTU kg of Danisco Phyzyme XP added. The average particle sizes 1 of CaCO (along with % solubility) tested were 28 (74.4), 137 (56.4), 299 (47.0), 388 (53.0), 519 (46.7), 760 3 (45.3), 796 (42.2) and 1306 (43.4) µm. Significantly (p 70.0%) limits PP hydrolysis to provide available P for growth and bone 3