Confience’s Sample Master® LIMS Meets Data Management Needs at the Farmers Edge Laboratory
Farmers Edge needed a turnkey Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) that could be quickly implemented.
Farmers Edge is a high-volume agricultural laboratory that tests soil, plant tissue and livestock manure for nutrients and provides their customers with expertise to optimize placement of crop inputs such as fertilizer and crop protection products. Growers leverage the information obtained from various soil and plant analyses to develop land and farm management solutions that will maximize productivity. Farmers Edge Laboratories are dedicated to providing the most efficient, accurate and timely analysis services for soil, manure and plant tissues in the industry. They provide a suite of services that are supported by their state-of-the-art testing laboratory which provides quick, accurate, and consistent results to their customers. These services include:
Field Scouting: Being able to choose the right scouting solution allows Farmers Edge customers to optimally manage a farm. Highly trained Certified Crop Advisors provide quality, accuracy and economic advice to their customers’ cropping requirements. They specialize in agronomics, and packages are available for full season scouting or individual scouting visits such as weeds/herbicide, disease/fungicide, and insect/insecticide.
Crop Planning: Through a network of team members, Farmers Edge agronomists assist clients in developing cropping plans. Considering agronomics and economics, and analyzing detailed crop budgets, histories, up-to-date variety information and market outlooks, agronomists can provide tailored cropping plans.
Fertility Planning: Farmers Edge specializes in soil fertility and help clients maximize their fertilizer dollars by recommending the right products and amounts to maximize yields. They also provide soil sampling services ranging from simple geo-referenced composite tests to more detailed zone and grid testing.
Their Challenge
Farmers Edge needed a turnkey LIMS that could be quickly implemented to support the Consulting Division of their new laboratory. The system would not only need to facilitate login, sample tracking, result entry, viewing sample status, QA/ QC, but also facilitate electronic data transfer for interfacing laboratory instruments as well as quoting and invoicing functions. Their timeline for equipping the laboratory with a fully functioning LIMS was six months, and high volumes were anticipated immediately.
Patrick Visser | Technical Manager
Farmers Edge Laboratories
Our Solution
After interviewing a variety of vendors, the Farmers Edge Management Team chose Confience, a software development firm with over three decades of laboratory automation expertise. This decision was based on Confience’s expertise in the agriculture market, their ISO certification, and the software’s configurability. Sample Master LIMS is open and extendable to the customer. One of the LIMS' main strengths is its reporting capabilities. Sample Master comes with over 70 standard reports, all of which may be copied and/or modified. This includes production reports, management reports, project and client billing, turnaround time, and many others.
Sample Master LIMS has provided the flexibility and scalability that Farmers Edge needed to ensure timely implementation; it met or exceeded all their expectations of a commercial LIMS product. Confience and Farmers Edge worked together to dramatically improve the laboratory workflow, and in turn, the laboratory has realized monumental time savings in clerical, report review and report delivery overhead.
Confience engineers interfaced the following instruments: two Thermo ICPs, balances, five SKALAR flow chemical systems, a custom-built pH/EC instrument, and a FOSS Kjeltec. Instrument integration played an integral role in the project’s overall success by eliminating transcription errors and improving reporting accuracy and speed.
Sample Master LIMS has successfully allowed Farmers Edge to grow sample volumes, as well as expand their testing capabilities, maximize productivity and efficiency, and rapidly provide their customers with the highest quality data available and user-friendly reports.
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