Mobile and hand-held near infrared infrared spectrometers in feed evaluation―Solutions to challenges?

Prasad, K.V.S.V., Yonas, A., Melesse, A., Kosmowski, F., Padmakumar,V. and Blümmel, M. 2019. Mobile and hand-held near infrared infrared spectrometers in feed evaluation―Solutions to challenges? IN: Das, A., Das, S., Sarkar, S., Patra, A.K., Manda, G.P. and Soren, S. (eds.). 2019. Nutritional Strategies for Improving Farm Profitability and Clean Animal Production. Book of Abstracts of International Conference on Animal Nutrition 2019, Kolkata, India, 17-19 December 2019. Karnal, India: National Dairy Research Institute.

550 Ethiopian food/feed/forage and concentrate samples were analysedfor nitrogen,fibre-fractions, metabolizable energy and invitro organic matter digestibility to develop mobile and hand-held NIRS calibration and equation models for prediction of these quality traits in a rapid, non-destructive and inexpensive manner. Two NIRS instruments were used: Thermo mobile microPhazir with a sales price of about 40 000 US $ and hand-held TellSpec with a sales price of about 1 500 US $. The coefficient of determination (R2) value for Thermo microPhazir calibration and blind predictions of N, NDF, ADF, ADL, ME and IVOMD ranged between 0.85-0.98 and 0.67-0.97, respectively and for the TellSpec ranged between 0.84-0.96 and 0.58-0.89indicating that mobile and hand-held NIRS can be used for feed evaluation of different feeds with moderate (ADL) to high (ADF, NDF, ME, IVOMD and N) accuracy.