Dairyland Labs, Arcadia, Wis., has announced that it has begun adding analysis data for chloride by Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIR) to forage reports.
“For more than 30 years, Dairyland has avoided including chloride in NIR packages because mineral accuracy by NIR is poor, and we felt DCAD balancing should be done using chemistry or x-ray fluorescence (XRF) analyses,” the company stated in an informational bulletin on the subject.
Dairyland maintains that position, noting that mineral analysis by NIR always is going to be risky because minerals do not produce an NIR signal. But they have chosen to add the metric to their standard forage reports because:
- NIR analysis has expanded into new geographies that chemistry and XRF haven’t yet reached. They said for customers in those regions, withholding chloride values removes the only potential source of information they have about its variation.
- Potassium is a large driver of DCAD variation in forages, and it already is included in Dairyland’s NIR packages, so it seemed illogical to include potassium but not chloride.
Dairyland noted that NIR has the ability to account for 50-80% of the variation in chloride. For ration formulators who have no other evaluation source, this information is far preferrable to relying strictly on book values for chloride.
The lab maintains that if chemistry or XRF analyses are available, either of those methods still are preferrable to NIR for DCAD balancing. They said their inclusion of NIR for chloride should not be viewed as “close enough” if formulators have access to more accurate assessments.
