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Abstract
Accurate poultry diet formulation depends on accurate prediction of the nutritional values of feed ingredients. One of the more useful nutritional values to know is nitrogen corrected true metabolizable energy (TMEN). The animal bioassay used to determine TMEN of feed ingredients is costly, and in commercial feed mill settings it cannot be completed on delivered ingredients before they are utilized in diets. Near Infrared Reflectance Spectroscopy (NIRS) is a rapid analysis method that enables a Multi-Purpose Analyzer to be calibrated to predict nutritional component values after analyzing the reflectance of a feed ingredient in the near infrared spectrum. A calibration was made for TMEN (Kcal/kg) using 53 samples which resulted in prediction equation with a correlation coefficient of 0.96. This prediction equation was then validated with 48 new samples and the correlation coefficient between the NIRS and bioassay TMEN values was 0.92 indicating a highly successful NIRS calibration was achieved.