ASAS-NANP Symposium: Ruminant/Nonruminant Feed Composition: Challenges and opportunities associated with creating large feed ingredient composition tables.

Traditional feed composition tables have been a useful tool in the field of animal nutrition throughout the last 70 years. The objective of this paper is to discuss challenges and opportunities associated with creating large feed ingredient composition tables. This manuscript will focus on three topics discussed during the National Animal Nutrition Program (NANP) symposium in ruminant and non-ruminant nutrition carried out at the ASAS annual meeting in Austin, TX on 11th July 2019, namely: a) Using large datasets in feed composition tables and the importance of standard deviation in nutrient composition, as well as different methods to obtain accurate standard deviation values; b) Discussing the importance of fiber in animal nutrition and the evaluation of different methods to estimate fiber content of feeds, and c) Description of novel feed sources such as insects, algae, and single cell protein, and challenges associated to the inclusion of such feeds in feed composition tables. Development of feed composition tables presents important challenges. For instance, large datasets provided by different sources tend to have errors and misclassifications. In addition, data are in different file formats, data structure and feed classifications. Managing such large databases requires computers with high processing power and software that are also able to run automated procedures to consolidate files, to screen out outlying observations, and detect misclassified records. Complex algorithms are necessary to identify misclassified samples and outliers aimed to obtain accurate nutrient composition values. Fiber is an important nutrient for both monogastrics and ruminants. Currently, there are several methods available to estimate fiber content of feeds. However, many of them do not estimate fiber accurately. Total dietary fiber (TDF) should be used as the standard method to estimate fiber concentrations in feeds. Finally, novel feed sources are a viable option to replace traditional feed sources from a nutritional perspective, but the large variation in nutrient composition among batches makes it difficult to provide reliable nutrient information to be tabulated. Further communication and cooperation among different stakeholders in the animal industry is required to produce reliable data on nutrient composition to be published in feed composition tables.