Animal Feed Analytical Service (AFAS)

Areas of Expertise: Sustainable Livestock

Service: Diagnostic & Analytical

AFBI operates a commercial forage analysis service based at its Hillsborough site.

Animal Feed Analytical Service (AFAS)

The Animal Feed Analytical Service (AFAS) is an innovative commercial forage analysis service based on high quality, peer-reviewed research. It embraces new techniques and methods to reduce costs and speed up analysis time. The AFAS is available to the farming industry in the whole of Ireland and beyond.

What can AFAS analyse?

At present AFBI routinely analyses:

Grass, maize and whole-crop silage
Grass for ensiling
Grass for grazing

The service differs from conventional analytical services in that it incorporates performance prediction tables covering dairy cows, beef cattle, suckler cows, growing lambs and ewes in addition to the normal analytical parameters of protein, fibre, dry matter etc.

The service:

Is fast
Is accurate – a large sample better reflects the sample pit
Is non-destructive and non-polluting
Predicts biological parameters which cannot be determined directly by wet chemistry e.g. intake, Metabolisable Energy (ME)

AFBI guarantees to report within 4 working days in the case of grass silage and 10 working days in the case of maize and whole crop silages.
Grass reports are usually same day, or for samples received late in the day, by noon the next day.

Contact

For further information, sampling packs and pre-paid postage bags please contact Animal Feed Analytical Services