This paper presents methods for spectral band selection in hyperspectral image (HSI) cubes based on classification of reflectance data acquired from samples of livestock feed materials and ruminant-derived bonemeal. Automated detection of ruminant-derived bonemeal in animal feed is tested as part of an on-going research into development of automated, reliable fast and cost-effective quality control systems. HSI cubes contain spectral reflectance in both spatial dimensions and spectral bands. Support vector machines are used for classification of data in various domains. Selecting a subset of the spectral bands speeds processing and increases accuracy by reducing over-fitting. We developed two methods utilizing divergence values for selecting spectral band sets, 1) evolutionary search method and 2) divergence-based recursive feature elimination approach. © 2014-IOS Press.