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Abstract
As the human population continues to grow, demand for animal protein will increase. Worldwide, poultry meat and eggs are the largest source of animal protein produced and consumed. Therefore, it is vital to decrease poultry production inefficiency. Feeding commercial poultry is the costliest aspect of their production. Thus, it is imperative to match the nutrient requirements needed for maintenance, growth and production of poultry with the nutrients provided by poultry diets. Accurate poultry diet formulation depends upon on knowing the nutrient content of feed ingredients being used. One of the more useful nutritional values to know for an ingredient is the nitrogen corrected true metabolizable energy (TMEN) which indicates the available energy the bird will obtain from consuming the ingredient. The animal bioassay used to determine the TMEN of feed ingredients is costly, and in commercial feed mill settings the results from the bioassay will be available after the tested ingredient has been fed. 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. The primary goal of the current research was to create a calibration curve that accurately predicted the TMEN value for individual feed ingredients. Multiple calibration curves were created and validated by comparing predicted NIRS values with bioassay determined values of feed ingredients. While the calibration curve that incorporated all tested conventional and alternative feed ingredients had a validation R2 value of 0.92, only 64% of the predicted values were within plus or minus 5% of their bioassay determined value. In contrast, calibration curves based on individual ingredient type such as corn or soybean meal resulted in 100 and 85% of samples, respectively being within plus or minus 5% of their bioassay determined value. The results indicate that NIRS can be used to efficiently predict TMEN of poultry feed ingredients which will decrease the cost of poultry diets by more precisely matching the energy content of the diet with the bird’s energy requirement.
INDEX WORDS: Poultry production, Diet formulation, Feed mills
INDEX WORDS: Poultry production, Diet formulation, Feed mills