Rapid near infrared prediction of broiler manure nutrient contents

The objective of this study was to investigate the feasibility of using near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy (NIRS) to determine nutrient contents in broiler manures. 183 samples of their nutrient contents (total nitrogen, total phosphorus, total potassium, ammonia-nitrogen and efficient phosphorus) using conventional means were collected. Samples were scanned from 1421.5～2572.2 nm on a WQF-400N NIR system. Calibrations were developed using a leave-one-out cross validation procedure under partial least-squares regression. There was sensible correlation between the predicted results and true value in the 20 samples. Their correlative coefficients were 0.9574, 0.9590, 0.9870, 0.9572 and 0.9650, respectively; their Root Mean Squared Deviations(RMSD) were 0.0014, 0.0012, 0.0012, 2.3041×10^-4 and 0.3814, respectively. It shows that NIRS will be a viable alternative to conventional analysis procedures for manure nutrient content prediction.