The Use of Oat Flour Combined with Salmon Meal in the Diet of Fingerling Silver Salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch)

Abstract

Summary and Conclusions

Beef liver, salmon meal, and mixtures of salmon meal and oat flour were fed experimentally to young silver salmon fingerlings.

In the feeding tests of 24 weeks duration the lots of fish that received liver combined with air dried salmon meal or salmon meal to which oat flour had been added before or after drying increased in weight at a faster rate, required less food, at a materially lowered cost, to produce a pound of fish than the control lot fed on a diet of 100 percent beef liver.

The addition of oat flour to the fish pulp before drying, in amounts equal to 5 percent of the final product, resulted in a food that when mixed with liver and fed to young silver salmon was superior to those meals that contained no oat flour. Amounts of oat flour in the final salmon meal product, in excess of 5 percent (9.1% to 28.6%), reduced the rate of weight increase and resulted in an increased cost of producing the fish.

Cooking the oat flour before adding it to the salmon meal and liver to form the diet for young silver salmon for a three months feeding test did not significantly increase the utilization of the food by the fish in comparison with a similar lot of fish fed the flour in an uncooked form.