AgGateway announced that Adisseo has been named the winner of the AgGateway 2013 Information Technology (IT) Innovation Award for its web-based platform, Precise Nutrition Evaluation (PNE). The award, sponsored by AgGateway and CSC, was presented last week at the AgGateway Annual Conference.
AgGateway’s IT Innovation Award recognizes distinguished efforts in the promotion of electronic standards and protocols in agri-business. It also serves as a “grand prize” of IT awards presented by three AgGateway member associations during the year: the Agricultural Retailers Association (ARA), CropLife America (CLA) and the American Feed Industry Association (AFIA).
“Our goal is to highlight to the agriculture industry – and to the community as a whole – what is being accomplished with current innovative eBusiness technologies, with the hope that these innovations will stimulate an even greater use of technology,” said AgGateway President and CEO Rod Conner.
“All of this year’s entries were outstanding,” added Josh Wall of CSC in presenting the award. “Adisseo’s application truly represents the goal of eBusiness in agriculture – they took the latest technologies in science and information systems and applied them to common practices in the feed industry. These improvements resulted in more efficient, timely and accurate analysis for immediate users and others within the supply chain – especially in improving the bottom line for producers and growers.”
The winning PNE platform, launched in September 2012, combines an Internet-accessible database with near infrared spectroscopy technology. It provides industry specialists with dynamic information about the nutrient content of 25 common feed ingredients, giving nutritionists, livestock producers and feed manufacturers more control over the nutritional composition of their feeds. It also allows purchasing decisions to be adjusted based on ingredient quality, giving buyers and purchasing groups the ability to shop for the best value and to verify product quality in a timely manner.
A process that used to take hours is now reduced to several minutes. “Today, PNE’s calibrations are encrypted in the cloud, analyses are returned within two to three minutes, and data are always available to the customer in case they want to track the nutritional content of ingredients,” said Dr. Rob Shirley, Adisseo’s poultry technical manager.
The two other contestants this year were ARA’s winner, WinField R7 Tool, a comprehensive precision farming tool that enables variable-rate prescriptions for seed, crop protection and crop nutrient applications; and CropLife America’s winner, WinField Spray Analysis System, which simulates real-world performance of crop protection application equipment and products to help growers reduce waste and off-target applications.
