2025 Volume 41 Issue 1 Pages 1-9
High nutritional value is considered very important in breeding of forage crops cultivars. Total digestible nutrient (TDN) is a nutritional value-assessment term used for feed evaluation and is estimated from in vitro dry matter digestibility (IVDMD) and acid detergent fiber (ADFom) content. Cultivars with high nutritional value and high yield can be bred by careful selection of cultivars with high IVDMD and ADFom values and yield because they are genetic traits. In general, the feed component value of a dry pulverized pasture product obtained using chemical analysis or near infrared spectrometry is used as a selection index for component breeding, but pulverization is laborious. Therefore, in this study, we aimed to develop a near-infrared reflectance spectroscopic analysis system that can quickly estimate feed component values in a breeding field using a small sensor. The analysis system bypassed the requirement of grinding or chemical analysis and simply used the spectra of shredded material of raw forage crops to estimate the dry matter (DM), IVDMD, ADFom, and TDN contents with practical accuracy. As this result, through further data accumulation, it is now evident that the system can be developed to estimate the DM, IVDMD, ADFom, and TDN contents of forage crops with practical accuracy.
