Alfalfa in Pan

Evaluating Alfalfa – A Blind Study of 39 Labs

We presented a poster at the California Alfalfa and Forage Symposium last November. The full paper is now available for download.

A method to prepare unground alfalfa samples with uniform composition indistinguishable from routine, cored alfalfa samples is reported. These samples were sent to fourty NFTA certified laboratories to determine the Relative Feed Value (RFV) by NIR and/or wet chemistry. The variation in ADF was much lower than NDF. In the paper we argue the merits of using blind samples and calculating RFV from ADF alone to circumvent this problem. At Weld Labs we perform NDF analyses using the reference method to minimize problems.