Forage calibration transfer from laboratory to portable near infrared spectrometers

Portable near infrared (NIR) spectrometers are now readily available on the market and with their smaller size, weight and cost have provided the opportunity to analyze forages both on farms and directly in the field. As new technologies and new portable NIR instruments become available on the market, calibrations for these instruments become a major constraint due to the costs and time necessary to collect reference data. This study evaluated techniques to transfer calibrations for alfalfa and grass forage samples that were developed for a scanning benchtop monochromator (FOSS 6500, 400–2498 nm, LAB) to a diode array instrument (AuroraNir, 950–1650 nm, DA), a digital light processing instrument (NIR-S-G1, 950–1650 nm, DLP) and a short wavelength instrument (SCiO, 740–1070 nm, SCIO). Alfalfa (N = 612) and grass (N = 516) samples from eight agronomic studies were analyzed by wet chemistry for crude protein, neutral detergent fiber (NDF), acid detergent fiber (ADF), in-vitro digestibility (IVTD) and NDF digestibility (NDFD) and divided into calibration, test-set, standardization and inoculation/prediction datasets. Different calibration transfer strategies were evaluated: Spectral Bias Correction (SBC), Shenk and Westerhaus algorithm (SW), Piecewise Direct Standardization (PDS), Dynamic Orthogonal Projection (DOP) or creating a new calibration using LAB predictions of the inoculation/prediction dataset as reference values. All computations for trimming, calibration, validation and standardization were developed using R. SBC with inoculation was an effective method to transfer calibrations for DA. Validation errors for DA transferred calibrations were about 15% lower than LAB for alfalfa data but 6% greater for grass data. For SCIO after DOP spectral adjustment, predicting errors were slightly greater than LAB for both data sets, while prediction errors with DLP were two to three times greater than LAB even after inoculation. PDS created spectral artifacts in the spectra of all three portables, which then resulted in large validation errors. Using LAB predictions as reference values was suitable only for DA, while DLP and DA had large prediction errors. This study showed that calibration sharing between a benchtop and portable instruments is challenging, but possible depending on the portable technologies and the transfer method. Spectral bias correction plus inoculation was the best method to transfer multivariate models for the forage components’ prediction from LAB to handhelds, particularly for DA. Application of DOP was beneficial for SCIO to successfully maintain performance of the original calibration, while for DLP the prediction models were not accurate. Additional studies are necessary to verify these transferring techniques can also be applied to fresh forages, allowing an easier and extended implementation of NIR analysis directly in fields.