The importance of NIR spectroscopy in the estimation of nutritional quality of grains for ruminants

The production of grain for export and domestic use is one of Australia's most important agricultural industries, and the NIR technique has been used extensively over many years for the routine monitoring of grain quality, particularly moisture and protein content. Because most Australian grain is intended for human food production, the determinants of grain quality for livestock feed, apart from protein, have been largely ignored. However the increasing use of grain for feeding to pigs, poultry, beef cattle and dairy cows has led to an important national research project entitled “Premium Grains for Livestock”. Two of the objectives of this project are to determine the compositional and functional characteristics of grains which influence their nutritional quality for the various classes of livestock, and to adopt rapid and objective analytical tests for these quality criteria. NIR has been used in this project firstly to identify a set of grain samples from a large population of breeders' lines which showed a wide spectral variation, and hence a potentially wide variation in nutritional value. The selected samples were not only subjected to an extensive array of chemical, physical and in vitro analyses, but also were grown out to produce sufficient quantities of grain to feed to animals in vivo studies. Additional grains were also strategically selected from farms in order to include the effect of weather damage, such as rain, drought and frost. In this study to date, NIR calibrations have been derived or attempted, on both ground and whole grains, for in vivo dry matter digestibility (DMD), pepsin-cellulase dry matter disappearance, protein, fat, acid detergent fibre, neutral detergent fibre, starch, in sacco DMD and in vitro assays to simulate starch digestion in the lumen and small intestine. Results so far indicate high calibration accuracy for chemical components (SECV 0.3 to 2.6%) and very promising statistics for in vivo DMD (SECV 1.8, $R^2$ 0.93, SD 7.0, range 61.9 to 92.3, n=60). There appears to be some potential for NIR to estimate some in vitro properties, depending upon the accuracy of reference methods and appropriate sample populations. Current work is in progress to extend the range of grains with in vivo DMD values (a very laborious and expensive process) and to increase the robustness of the various NIR calibrations, with the aim of implementing uniform testing procedures for nutritional value of grains throughout Australia.