Provisional assessment of forage quality in common vetch using near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy

Techniques involving wet chemistry are time- and money-consuming, and the waste they generate is harmful to the environment. The near infrared technology not only makes it feasible to quickly examine various parameters, but also to determine all of these parameters at once. For the purpose of identifying the forage quality components of crude protein (CP), acid detergent fiber (ADF), neutral detergent fiber (NDF), dry matter (DM), and ash, a calibration of Near Infrared Reflectance (NIR) spectroscopy was obtained. In this study, it was aimed to develop a common vetch specific near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy calibration by using 197 samples consisting of different common vetch lines and varieties. For the calibration of DM, CP, ADF, and NDF, second derivative pretreatment was utilized; for ash, first derivative pretreatment was used. The coefficients of determination (R²) in the calibration set were 0.977 for DM, 0.856 for ash, 0.823 for CP, 0.754 for ADF and 0.630 for NDF. The validations performed over the DM, ash, CP, NDF and ADF parameters of mean values and the coefficient of determination in the external validation (r2) were 92.44,0.974; 1.953, 0.822; 17.04, 0.784; 42.24, 0.659; 30.56, 0.644, respectively. The equtaions for DM (RPDv = 6.247) showed high accuracy, while the equations for ash (RPDv = 2.367), CP (RPDv = 2.146), NDF (RPDv = 2.037) and ADF (RPDv = 2.010) showed relatively high accuracy. The dry matter equations were suitable for quantitative prediction of common vetch quality, according to the relative predictive determinant ratios (RPDv) for calibration, whilst the CP, ADF, NDF, and ash equations were helpful for screening. It was determined that NIR spectroscopy may be used to successfully predict CP, ADF, DM, and ash in samples of common vetch.