Four experiments were carried out to investigate the effects on growth, food conversion efficiency (FCE) and apparent diet digestibility, of wetting food before offering it to individually caged growing chickens. 2. Female broiler chicks (8/treatment) were given grower food ad libitum from 28-49 d of age either in the dry form or wetted with 2.0 kg water/kg air dry food, or wet food restricted to the same daily amount of dry matter as eaten by the dry-fed birds. Ad libitum feeding of the wet food significantly increased food intake and body weight gain, compared to dry feeding, while weight gains of birds with restricted feeding of wet food were intermediate. 3. Experiments 2 and 3 studied the effects of the time interval between mixing the food with water and offering it to the birds. When pre-soaking times of 0, 12 and 24 h were compared with dry food for male broilers (8/treatment) from 25 to 40 d all wet treatments increased body weight gains significantly, the best results coming from the zero soaking time, when DM digestibility was increased significantly from 677 to 714 g/kg. When restricted amounts of food were offered hourly for 8 h on each of 4 d, DM digestibility was significantly increased from 634 for dry food to 659 for that freshly mixed with water and 664 g/kg for that soaked for 1 h between mixing and offering. 4. In a factorial experiment with wet and dry food, either in the standard form or with added enzyme or 400 g/kg cornflour, there were significant positive effects on growth and FCE of broilers (7/treatment) attributable to enzyme and wetting, while cornflour significantly reduced growth. However, wet cornflour-diluted food gave better growth than dry standard food. Wetting significantly increased the apparent digestibility of dry matter and protein while dilution with cornflour significantly reduced protein digestibility. 5. These results confirm those previously presented in terms of improved growth and FCE with wet feeding and demonstrate a large improvement in the proportion of the food absorbed from the digestive tract, of similar magnitude to the improvement in FCE. They also show that it is not necessary to pre-soak food in order to attain the maximum effect.
