Nutrient Analysis of Premixes and Feed Additives
FT-NIR Analysis of Premixes & Feed Additives
Inadequate animal nutrition is a major cause for low profitability of any livestock operation. Individually tailored feed premixes can ensure an optimal dosing of additives for better nutrient availability and help to formulate customized rations so that animals are getting the recommended nutrient levels.
By utilizing premixes in feed formulation this optimal nutrient composition can be secured and adapted during formulation depending on the actual available raw materials and ingredients.
Premixes are complex mix of vitamins, minerals, trace elements, enzymes and other nutritional additives to incorporate in feed between e.g. 0,5 and 8%. Its main objective is to deliver the micro ingredients in a manner desired by the consumer. Premixing requires sustainable safety and high quality checks for the ingredients which may have certain potency and the premix consistency and homogeneity.
Feed premixes are complex mixtures which are often customized and can content additives with an high impact. In general premix ingredients can be identified by NIR to ensure only right materials with required quality are mixed in premix batches.
A great variety of organic substances can be identified, e.g. vitamins, amino acids, enzyme formulations etc. Moreover, many inorganic substances or minerals can be differentiated due to the fingerprint of the adsorbed water or defined crystal water.
In addition to the identification a conformity test can be applied which checks if a new spectrum is inside a set of reference spectra. This evaluation is specific for each data point in a spectrum and therefore very sensitive depending on the set threshold.
The conformity test allows a real fingerprinting and non-targeted screening to investigate deviations from previous samples and batches known as inside the specifications. This can be used for pure ingredients or for finished premixes e.g. to avoid any false dosing.
Quantification of constituents or sample properties is very likely the most common application in NIR spectroscopy and is applied for moisture analysis in ingredients, composition analysis of vitamin or amino acid content in premixes and more.
The calibration work requires samples and reference values which are used in the OPUS QUANT2 package to create calibration models. QUANT2 is a comprehensive framework to setup, calibrate and validate models with certain tools, plots and statistics.
