Fall Sampling Season Checklist

Fall soil sampling season is soon approaching. To ensure as few disruptions as possible once the sampling begins, here are a few points to address now.

1. Contact the lab or your ALGL regional agronomist to update your account if there have been changes in staff, email contacts, or phone numbers. Be sure to consider all those employees involved in the process, samplers, accounting, sales and consulting.
2. Update your Client Portal Access. Those customers who are designated as Account Administrators can add new users to their account and select which portions of the Portal can be accessed. This can be done without contacting the lab.
3. Please let us know if there have been any changes to your normal sampling routine such as hiring a new sampling service or using a new shipping provider. This will help the lab staff to better communicate potential issues to the correct contacts.
4. If you have made a change in software, contact your ALGL regional agronomist so they can modify your account settings to ensure that the data flow is correctly configured. It is also a good idea to do a test with a small sample number to ensure the data flows correctly and any needed changes in procedure are identified before the season starts.
5. Order soil bags and shipping boxes ahead of time. Please coordinate with your ALGL agronomist to schedule delivery or pickup of large orders.
6. Check your UPS shipping labels. Do you need more or have they expired? The expiration date is on the lower portion of your UPS labels. After this date the tracking of the package can become unreliable. If you need new labels contact the lab or your ALGL regional agronomist and they can get new labels on the way. Remember that you can create shipping labels on the Client Portal. This is not necessarily a replacement for ordering preprinted labels but can save a lot of time in a pinch.
7. At the beginning of each year a summary of the previous year’s samples is posted to your eDocs account. That report shows what fields by grower/farm/field that were sampled each year. For example, if you sample every two years, you can look back to the 2024 sampling report to ensure no resampling is missed.
8. If you are sampling fields that you have previously done, take the time now to pre label the soil bags and pre generate labs submission forms.

Your ALGL agronomist is available to discuss your soil sampling protocols and help find ways to streamline your fall soil sampling.