Feedipedia
Feedipedia is an open-access information system on animal feed resources that provides information on nature, occurrence, chemical composition, nutritional value and safe use of nearly 1400 worldwide livestock feeds. It is managed jointly by INRA, CIRAD, AFZ and FAO.
New Zealand is seeking to improve the accessibility of feed and diet data for use in compiling national greenhouse gas inventories for livestock in East and Southern Africa and the ASEAN countries. This requires knowledge of the main diets consumed by livestock and the chemical composition of the feed ingredients that compose each diet. The main diets in each industry can only be ascertained by a review of the literature and local surveys, but the chemical composition of the component feeds is well documented in a range of feed databases, including the ASARECA, ILRI Sub-Saharan feeds and Feedipedia compilations.
Due to French colonial history, the AFZ database (which is used to provide the tabulated values on the Feedipedia website) is well supplied with data from many ASEAN and African countries. This database containing all the desired data consists of information for 6,200 feeds based on 36,000 samples. The information consists of 282,000 chemical data and 10,000 in vivo data. However, Feedipedia (managed by AFZ) does not currently supply data by source nation, so tabulated mean data on the same forage will be based on all global data and may lack accuracy in describing the feed in any particular region. For this reason, there is a need to access data from the AFZ database with recognition of country of origin in its data, so that each country can base its inventory calculations on attributes of feedstuffs from its own and neighbouring countries.