Soil Sampling Season Preparation

The fall soil sampling season is upon us. Are you ready? Here are a couple of things you can do in advance of the sampling season to help things run smoother.

1. Call the lab, or your ALGL regional agronomist, to update your account if there have been changes in staff, email contacts, or phone numbers.
2. If you have made a change in software, call your ALGL regional agronomist so that 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.
3. Order soil bags and shipping boxes ahead of time. We are working hard to ensure that we have ample supply of sampling materials, but shipping delays could impact your access to supplies.
4. 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 call the lab or your ALGL regional agronomist and they can get new labels on the way.
5. Many customers are making the switch to Mehlich 3 soils data. If you have made the decision to switch or would like to make any changes to your reported data, contact your ALGL regional agronomist. The change to Mehlich 3 data can be made to your pdf reports, your data export files, or both.
6. Every January a summary of the previous year’s samples is posted to your eDocs account. That report shows what field by grower/farm/field that were sampled each year. For example, if you sample every two years, you can look back to the 2020 sampling report to ensure no resampling is missed.
7. If you are resampling for customers, take the time now to pre label the soil bags and pre generate labs submission forms.

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