Ailsa Craig lab plans to add in-house testing

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

by JIM ALGIE

Improved package transport has broadened the reach of agricultural labs and heightened competition for soil and crop analysis, Honeyland Ag Services founder Chris Roelands said in an interview, Monday.

A recently announced partnership between Roelands’ 18-month-old Ailsa Craig, Ont. lab and Cumberland Valley Agricultural Services of Maryland reflects a broadening shift in the business. Major Ontario labs deal now with clients across Canada, and U.S. labs have begun seeking business here.

“It’s new technology, higher quality results and faster turnaround times,” Roelands said from his office. “There’s a big transition going on right now in the lab industry,” he said.

“It appears that things are moving from kind of a regional model to a national or an international model for labs,” Roelands explained.

Established in 1993, Cumberland has 100 employees in four locations and specializes in lab analysis of forage samples to suit the management needs mainly of dairy producers. Honeyland does that plus a wide range of plant tissue and soil analysis. It’s among three new satellite affiliates for Cumberland in Canada. The other two are in Quebec and British Columbia, Roelands said.

“Among the three of us it would make Cumberland the largest supplier of forage analysis in Canada,” he said.

Feed analysis is an increasingly significant part of forage production and livestock feeding, Ontario Forage Council manager Ray Robertson said in a recent interview. At least three Ontario labs are members of the forage council as farmer members look for ways to improve the efficiency of feeding livestock, Robertson said.

“A lot more people get feed analysed now than used to,” Robertson said. “There is a growing awareness that you need to know what you’re feeding your animals, trying to maximize the production of your animals,” he said.

“You want to make sure you’re doing the best you can . . . In order to balance your ration you’ve got to know what’s in your feed,” Robertson said.

A diploma graduate in Agriculture from the University of Guelph and a veteran of feed and lab businesses in Ontario, Chris and his wife, Jen, who also has a background in agricultural lab work, launched Honeyland in 2013 on their cash crop farm near London.

Relatively high-value markets for crops in recent years and, more recently, rising livestock markets have his clients thinking increasingly about the efficiency of crop and livestock operations, Roelands said.

“It’s precision agriculture,” he said. “People are just trying to fine tune all that much more.

“When the price goes up, soil sampling and plant tissue sampling is definitely part of the fine tuning,” Roelands said. “Higher price levels play into more testing,” he said.

Roelands’ new lab is among seven-or-so active in feed testing in Ontario, at least three of which also provide soil chemistry analysis. Price is a talking point for such competing services but most of the competition occurs over questions of customer satisfaction and reporting details as well as the comprehensiveness of testing services.

“So, do you have the numbers on your report that can go into your nutritional model to formulate rations?” Roelands said, describing one way labs can compete by matching testing regimes to client needs. New, more detailed tests for digestible fibre in feed, for example, allow livestock feeders to better understand how their crop inputs serve the needs of their animals.

Improved logistics for transportation of plant and soil sample packages through couriers has helped broaden the reach of lab services.

“People can ship things further and have a lot of confidence that the packages are going to show up in the time frame . . . all that stuff just keeps getting better and better and that is a big part of what drives the business,” Roelands said.

As it is, he drives feed samples across the U.S. border four times weekly to ensure his clients’ samples reach Cumberland labs, which are accredited by the National Forage Testing Association (the U.S.-based association lists 11 certified labs in Canada). Current plans have Honeyland seeking accreditation in order to begin testing in-house as a Cumberland satellite, later this year.

“When we decided to work together, they said, let’s date before we get married,” Roelands said. “Part of that was me representing them up here and getting business together.”

“That’s been the biggest part of my job thus far was just getting enough volume together to say, `Yes, we can support a satellite here in Ontario and go from there,’” Roelands said. He expects to begin conducting in-house analysis within four months. BF