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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 ...

Note: Any citation leading to a software vendor's site is not to be considered a recommendation for that vendor. The citation should however still stand as a representational example of what vendors are implementing in their systems.

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A feed testing laboratory can operate within a number of different production, research and development (R&D; academic and industry), and public health contexts. 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 roles within these major contexts 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 context. 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 rarely different for animal feed.

further highlights the already obvious 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 arguably more challenging for software developers to create laboratory informatics solutions like a laboratory information management system (LIMS) that have the breadth to cover the production, R&D, and public health contexts of animal feed testing. In fact, an industry lab performing quality control (QC) work for a company will likely have zero interest in public health-driven reporting functionality (e.g., as per the Food and Drug Administration's Animal Food Regulatory Program Standards [AFRPS]), and a LIMS that focuses on QC workflows may be more highly desirable.