Chapter 14
Application of NIR in Agriculture
Baeten Vincent and Pierre Dardenne
Abstract NIR has been used for decades as an innovative technique in agriculture.
There are many benefits, and today, researchers active in agronomy science are not
the only ones using NIR extensively in their daily research but also breeders, farmers
and agri-processors, using it as an efficient tool for the assessment of a large number
of parameters and criteria including detection of contaminants. Undoubtedly, NIRS
has demonstrated clear advantages in the analysis of soil, crops, forages, silages and
faeces, but also for the analysis of agro-food products such as feed and dairy products.
These analyses are no more conducted only at the laboratory level but go more
and more to the sample. The new generation of instruments (portable and handheld
devices) allow to perform the analyses at the field, farm, orchard or greenhouse
level in order to get information to take the right decision at the right moment.
This chapter aims to summarise some of these applications and attempts to give the
trends of a selection of recently completed or current projects. Readers aiming to
delve further into the potential of NIR in agriculture can refer to dedicated books
(Williams and Norris in Amer Assn of Cereal Chemists, 312 p, 2001 [1]) or recent
reviews (Baeten et al. in Handbook of food analysis, pp 591–614, 2015 [2], Dale
et al. in Appl. Spectrosc. Rev. 48(2):142–159, 2013 [3], García-Sánchez et al. in
Agricultural systems, pp 97–127, 2017 [4]).
Keywords Quality · Agriculture · Agro-food · Forage · Feed · Farm · Crop ·
Faeces
B. Vincent (B)
Quality and Authentication of Products Unit, Department Knowledge and Valorization of
Agricultural Products, Walloon Agricultural Research Centre (CRA-W), Gembloux, Belgium
e-mail: v.baeten@cra.wallonie.be
P. Dardenne
Henseval Building, Chaussée de Namur 24, 5030 Gembloux, Belgium
e-mail: dardennepaj@gmail.com
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021
Y. Ozaki et al. (eds.), Near-Infrared Spectroscopy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8648-4_14
331
Application of NIR in Agriculture
Baeten Vincent and Pierre Dardenne
Abstract NIR has been used for decades as an innovative technique in agriculture.
There are many benefits, and today, researchers active in agronomy science are not
the only ones using NIR extensively in their daily research but also breeders, farmers
and agri-processors, using it as an efficient tool for the assessment of a large number
of parameters and criteria including detection of contaminants. Undoubtedly, NIRS
has demonstrated clear advantages in the analysis of soil, crops, forages, silages and
faeces, but also for the analysis of agro-food products such as feed and dairy products.
These analyses are no more conducted only at the laboratory level but go more
and more to the sample. The new generation of instruments (portable and handheld
devices) allow to perform the analyses at the field, farm, orchard or greenhouse
level in order to get information to take the right decision at the right moment.
This chapter aims to summarise some of these applications and attempts to give the
trends of a selection of recently completed or current projects. Readers aiming to
delve further into the potential of NIR in agriculture can refer to dedicated books
(Williams and Norris in Amer Assn of Cereal Chemists, 312 p, 2001 [1]) or recent
reviews (Baeten et al. in Handbook of food analysis, pp 591–614, 2015 [2], Dale
et al. in Appl. Spectrosc. Rev. 48(2):142–159, 2013 [3], García-Sánchez et al. in
Agricultural systems, pp 97–127, 2017 [4]).
Keywords Quality · Agriculture · Agro-food · Forage · Feed · Farm · Crop ·
Faeces
B. Vincent (B)
Quality and Authentication of Products Unit, Department Knowledge and Valorization of
Agricultural Products, Walloon Agricultural Research Centre (CRA-W), Gembloux, Belgium
e-mail: v.baeten@cra.wallonie.be
P. Dardenne
Henseval Building, Chaussée de Namur 24, 5030 Gembloux, Belgium
e-mail: dardennepaj@gmail.com
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021
Y. Ozaki et al. (eds.), Near-Infrared Spectroscopy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8648-4_14
331