Studies of Near Infrared Spectroscopy for P!'edicting Forage Quality of Tropical Grasses

Abstract

Introduction Near Infrared Reflectance Spectroscopy (NIRS) for forage has been widely and successfully used throughout the world, but the study for tropical grasses is still limited, especially in Asia including Japan and Indonesia. Tropical grasses show some differences from tempera te grasses in lea r ana tomy, chemical composition, cell wall concentrations (AKIN and BURDICK, 1973), and physical property (AKIN et al., 1975). The NIRS analysis is a physical method, non:..destructive measurement relaled to lhe energies absorbed from the incident radiation by molecular groups in the sample (M URRA Y and WILLIAMS, 1990), and might be limited to successful prediction of tropical grasses due to all these differences. This study has been done as prediction data from tropical forages by NIRS analysis in Asia, and for the reasons refered above. The aim of this study is to evaluate NIRS in prediction of nutrient content, such as moisture, protein, crude fiber, crude fat, ash, NFE, ADF, ADL, silica, organic matter, OCW, OCC, Oa, and Ob of tropical grasses compared with the previous study conducted in other forages.