Application of NIR in Agriculture

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]).