Ralph Ward

Dr. Ralph Ward is the founder and director of Cumberland Valley Analytical Services (CVAS), a laboratory providing forage and feed evaluation services in the U.S. and globally for the past 30 years. With a background in dairy production and nutritional services, Dr. Ward has focused on developing analytical systems for forage and feed quality determination and modeling in dairy rations.  He has worked to develop and expand the use of an extensive set of NIR equations and evaluation practices to multiple partner labs in the U.S. and globally.  His current focus is implementation of a new NDFD system and newly developed amino acid NIR equations for forage and dairy feed ingredients.  Currently he is working on development of improved starch digestibility characterization and the implementation of new technologies such as hyper-spectral imaging for understanding forage quality.