Transitioning to New Soil Sampling Software

The winter season provides many of our customers with the opportunity to stay inside and review and work on different aspects of the business or operation that is not possible to accomplish during the rest of the year. Whether driven by curiosity, new products seen at tradeshows, or a need to upgrade, a common inquiry lately has been about what soil sampling software options are available. Below is a list of software companies with links to their websites that we at ALGL have experience with receiving and exporting data to. This is by no means a promotion for any of these companies, nor is a complete list of options in the market.

Agrian https://www.globalagtechinitiative.com/tech-hub/agrian-inc/

Agworld https://www.agworld.com

Fieldalytics/EFC https://www0.efcsystems.com/cgi-bin/login.cgi

PCT https://pct.ag/

Proagrica (formerly SST Summit) https://proagrica.com/

SMS https://www.agleader.com/farm-management/sms-software/

Soil Test Pro https://soiltestpro.com/

Traction https://www.tractionag.com/field-app/

When selecting a new software package there are many features to be considered that really do not impact data flow to and from a soil testing laboratory such as, compatibility with equipment and other software, scouting options, local or cloud-based data storage, billing and invoicing options, customizable soil fertility recommendations, and the list goes on. What is important to the soil testing lab is communicating what program you are using once to have selected the one that fits your needs. While many software companies are adopting a common data format, the steps involved in delivering the data are different, and your lab account needs to be set up to accommodate this to make data transfer as easy as possible. When contacting the lab to make a change in software, this is the opportunity to make other updates to your account such as the units that are being reported (ppm vs. lb/ac), Mehlich-3 vs. NCR data, and selecting who electronically receives the data.