Skalar congratulates their valued customer Fertilab on their brand new laboratory.
Fertilab is an independent, agricultural laboratory specialized in soil, plant, fertilizer and water analysis located in Dronten, The Netherlands
At the beginning of this year, Skalar got the opportunity to visit the new location of Fertilab and have “a look behind the scenes” to see the Skalar automated soil analyzers in action in their modern agricultural laboratory.
Fertilab was founded in 2015 and has grown enormously since then. Thousands of samples are processed every year now and this is growing annually. The new building is fully equipped and offers enough additional space to allow continued growth.
Samples arrive in a huge reception area, even complete pallet trucks can be wheeled inside! From here, samples follow a logical order through the building. Most of the samples arrive in the morning and come from the Netherlands, but also from abroad. In the reception area, the samples are registered in Fertilab’s LIMS system, sorted and distributed to the various pre-treatment rooms. Fertilab offers analysis packages with a choice of 90 different tests in various combinations.
The next day, sample preparation such as sieving, filtration, weighing, adding acids etc. starts. Actually, sample pre-treatment forms 80% of the work when processing agricultural samples
After sample preparation, samples are offered to the different automated analyzers for analysis. Fertilab uses proven methods to analyze the various samples. For soil samples, they have developed their own method: the Fertilyse. The difference with other methods is that they measure which nutrients are really available for plants to absorb instead of the more common methods that determine which nutrients are in the ground.
Their modern laboratory is equipped with sophisticated analyzers, almost Skalar’s full range of soil analyzers is present. The Sanseries automatic nutrient analyzer for the simultaneous analysis of a wide range of nutrients such as ammonia chloride, phosphate, urea, nitrate etc. Primacsseries of combustion analyzers for determination of carbon, nitrogen and the c / n ratio and lastly our robotic platforms for the fully automatic analysis of pH / EC and particle size sample preparation for analysis by laser diffraction.
After analysis, the results are combined in a report and sent to the customer/applicant. In general, these are consultants who offer advice for the farmers how to cultivate the ground before the growing season starts and what additional fertilization steps need to be taken in the season.
We like to thank Fertilab for their very informative and educational tour. We appreciate their confidence and loyalty to our sophisticated soil analyzers. Looking forward to do more projects in the future.
For more information about our soil analyzer
