ISSUE FOCUS 56 FEED & ADDITIVE MAGAZINE April 2025 This means producers can adjust feed formulations with confidence, ensuring production animals receive the exact nutrients needed for optimal growth and performance – all while keeping costs in check. Optimising feed formulations helps to reduce waste and lowers the carbon footprint of feed production, for added sustainability gains. One of the biggest advantages of today’s NIR technology is speed and ease of use. Unlike traditional methods, NIR can analyse a sample in minutes with minimal processing. This makes it an invaluable tool for feed millers, nutritionists, and livestock producers looking for quick and reliable data on raw material or feed quality and composition to inform formulation choices. Another key factor that has driven NIR’s adoption across the feed industry is its versatility. It can be used to analyse and detect variations in a wide range of ingredients, providing consistent results across different locations and production systems. As a result, producers gain a more accurate understanding of ingredient/feed composition and quality, allowing them to make better purchasing and formulation decisions to enhance the efficiency of the entire process. WORKING HAND-IN-HAND (HELD) The demand for NIR technology has surged in recent years due to its ability to deliver precise, real-time analysis. Producers value its reliability over traditional wet chemistry, with fewer stages where things can go wrong. It is also a simpler process, displaying results so quickly that the user can analyse many samples of the same product at no extra cost. Moreover, advancements in miniaturisation and connectivity have further enhanced NIR’s capabilities and opened it up to a wider use base as it does not require specialised skills. For example, handheld and portable NIR devices now allow for on-site analysis, reducing the reliance on external laboratories and allowing producers to take control of their feed management strategies into their own hands. Benchtop spectrometers are now a very mature technology and recent connectivity improvements have enabled bigger networks of instruments to be supported more effectively. The potential for NIR sensors to be integrated into mobile devices is also on the horizon, which could enable a huge number of consumer applications, such as medication authenticity testing or fruit ripeness measurements. Energy Proximates Vitreousness Urease Phytate-p NSPs Reactive Lysine Protein Solubility SID Aas Corn Sorghum Wheat Barley Soybean meal Canola meal Other raw materials Feeds ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔
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