Effective July 1, 2009, Cornell University and Dairy One combined their strengths to provide soil and plant testing services to farmers and farm advisors in a new venture called Agro-One.

Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Dairy One Cooperative, Inc. are collaborating through Agro-One to insure that farmers and farm advisors in New York and the Northeast will have high-quality soil, plant tissue, and nutrient laboratory testing services available to them now and into the future. Additionally, the collaboration will provide a mechanism for delivery of new analytical services and systems in the future.

Cornell’s routine soil and plant tissue analysis will move to the Agro-One laboratory housed at Dairy One’s Ithaca facility. This allows Cornell to focus on soil and plant research and the development of innovative analytical methods, while Agro-One will focus on providing commercial soil and plant tissue analysis to farmers and their advisors. Agro-One will provide soil and plant tissue testing services available previously through the Cornell Nutrient Analysis Laboratory along with additional analytical services. Key input regarding analytical methods and quality control will be provided by Cornell, and Cornell nutrient management guidelines will be provided by Cornell through Agro-One.

Agro-One will bring together the strengths of Cornell’s knowledge and research in agronomy and horticulture with Dairy One’s industry-leading analytical capabilities and customer service. The Dairy One sample transportation system that blankets the Northeast will be available for soil and tissue samples submitted to the Agro-One lab. Agro-One will also provide an expanded set of analytical data for Cornell research.

Cornell’s move away from commercial laboratory services is consistent with Cornell’s continued focus on research and spinning off commercially-viable technologies to the private sector. Freeing up resources previously dedicated to commercial soil and plant tissue lab services will allow Cornell to enhance its research capabilities while improving the amount of data available through Agro-One.