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[[File:|right|450px]] Title: What types of testing occur within an animal feed testing laboratory?

Author for citation: Shawn E. Douglas

License for content: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Publication date: June 2024

Introduction

This brief topical article will ...

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Broad testing within the industry

A feed testing laboratory can operate within a number of different research and development (R&D; academic and industry), production, and public health roles. They can:

• act as a third-party consultant, interpreting analytical data;
• provide research and development support for new and revised formulations;
• provide analytical support for nutrition and contaminant determinations;
• provide development support for analytical methods;
• ensure quality to specifications, accreditor standards, and regulations;
• develop informative databases and data libraries for researchers;
• manage in-house and remote sample collection, labeling, and registration, including on farms; and
• report accurate and timely results to stakeholders, including those responsible for monitoring public health.

This wide variety of activities and workflows within these major roles highlights several aspects of the labs operating in the animal feed sector. First, like the more human-based food and beverage industry, the types of testing will vary based upon the role. From R&D and pre-production optimization and quality assurance (QA) to production and post-production quality control (QC) and regulatory safety, analytical workflows can differ, sometimes significantly, in the food and beverage industry. This is similarly true for labs in the animal feed industry. As such—regulations and standards aside—we can draw similar parallels in the test types found in feed analysis labs.

Second—and also similar to food and beverage testing—the activities and workflows listed above also highlight the cross-disciplinary nature of analyzing animal feed ingredients and products, and interpreting the resulting data. The human biological sciences, veterinary sciences, environmental sciences, chemistry, microbiology, radiochemistry, botany, epidemiology, and more may be involved within a given animal feed analysis laboratory. Given this significant cross-disciplinarity, it's can be challenging to characterize the full spectrum of testing found within feed testing labs.

For the rest of this article, we'll take a similar approach to the food and industry and break down testing by the various roles feed testing labs can fill.

Testing within the primary roles of a feed lab

The type of testing occurring within a feed lab will vary depending on the role it plays within the larger framework of industry needs. The following subsections examine the three primary roles of these labs and the testing required to meet their goals.

R&D roles

Overall food innovation and development:

Aroma/flavor analysis and formulation: Broadly speaking, "sensomic" studies—an approach to describing the sensory properties of foodstuffs at a molecular level—are not as important to the feed industry as they are to the food and beverage industry. However, secondarily, sensomic studies may be conducted on the resulting animal proteins (whether produced by the animal, e.g., milk or eggs, or as part of the animal, e.g., their meat) consumed by humans in conjunction with what is fed those animals. For example, laboratory research on the sensory perceptions of dairy and meat products derived from feeding animals certain forage and feed remains important. This can be a challenging task for laboratorians given complex matrices, chemical changes, and sensory relationships, requiring specialized analytical techniques and equipment.