The dietary effect of different wheat cultivars for broiler chickens

1. An experiment was conducted to examine the variability in chemical composition of 16 wheat cultivars and to study how this variability affected the performance of broiler chickens given diets containing 650 or 815 g wheat/kg diet during the first 3 weeks of life. Intestinal viscosity, apparent fat digestibility and apparent metabolisable energy were determined with all diets. Intestinal pH and the relative weight of different parts of the intestine were measured in chickens fed on diets with the high wheat inclusion. 2. The 16 wheat cultivars varied in chemical composition, with protein content ranging from 112 to 127 g/kg dry matter, starch content from 658 to 722 g/kg dry matter and non-starch polysaccharides from 98 to 117 g/kg dry matter. The effect of the different wheat cultivars on the measured parameters was most pronounced in chickens fed on diets with 815 g wheat/kg diet (P<0.001). However, significant (P<0.001) differences between cultivars were still present at the lower wheat content. 3. Milling-quality wheats resulted in better performance (P<0.001) than feeding-quality wheats at the high inclusion, whereas such an effect could not be registered in diets at the lower wheat inclusion. These results indicate that some of the feeding wheats are comparable in quality to milling wheats when included at the concentrations which are more common in practical broiler diets. 4. Decreasing the wheat content in the diets resulted in significantly (P<0.001) better performance and considerably (P<0.001) lower intestinal viscosity (jejunum; 2.4 to 5.9 cps, ileum; 4.6 to 10.9 cps) than in chickens fed on diets with the higher wheat inclusion level (jejunum; 9.1 to 38.4 cps, ileum; 20.8 to 82.0 cps). 5. Diets with 815 g wheat/kg influenced pH in the caeca, but not in the ileum and gizzard. The relative weights of the gizzard and ileum differed significantly (P<0.05) between treatments, whereas those of duodenum, jejunum and caeca were not affected by dietary addition of the different wheat cultivars. 6. The present study demonstrated that the chemical composition and the nutritive value of Danish wheats for broilers vary markedly. The results indicated that the non-starch polysaccharide and especially the arabinoxylan content of wheat are important factors in the discussion of the result obtained. Poor correlations were seen between performance and AMEn and care should be taken when using AMEn values alone to predict the nutritive value of wheat and wheat-based diets.