While there is still opportunity to further fine-tune the fat budget in our rations as research is devoted in this area, current tools give greater insight as to what strategies are working and which need further adjustments. Who knows, maybe someday balancing our rations with fat will be as easy as balancing that checkbook.

Recently, producers at the Nebraska Grazing Conference indicated that there is still a lot of apprehension around the use of NIRS in forage evaluation. The most common concern was that NIRS is “fine” for alfalfa but not accurate enough for grass forages.

Near-infrared reflectance spectrometry (NIRS) is no longer limited to a forage testing laboratory, but prior to investing in one, it is important to thoroughly research the features that can make or break this technology as a useful forage quality management tool.