Ever.Ag, a leader in providing comprehensive software and services for the agricultural supply chain, is excited to announce the acquisition of PrairiE Systems, an innovative company specializing in feed management software for pork producers. This acquisition underscores Ever.Ag’s commitment to adding value to the global food supply chain with their solutions across various sectors of agribusiness, particularly in animal protein production.

PrairiE Systems is renowned for its easy, empowering, and effective software solutions, including the Feed Allocation System (FAS), a sophisticated feed management software and Smart Order, an e-procurement system for ordering feed with the click of a button. These products have been instrumental in optimizing feed efficiency, enhancing livestock management, and streamlining procurement processes for pork producers, including large national pork producers.

“PrairiE Systems has been a leader in livestock feed management and feed procurement for nearly two decades, serving some of the largest players in the pork industry, providing mission critical software to pork producers,” said Scott Sexton, CEO of Ever.Ag. “Ever.Ag looks forward to supporting and expanding the vision of PrairiE Systems, making greater investments in the product to drive value to pork producers and everyone across the pork value chain.”

“We are excited to join forces with Ever.Ag and bring our technology to a wider audience,” said Joel Stave, Founder of PrairiE Systems. “Our shared dedication to innovation and customer service makes this partnership a perfect match. Together, we’ll continue to advance the capabilities and efficiency of pork producers through cutting-edge technology.”

PrairiE Systems will be joining Ever.Ag’s family of Livestock and Animal Protein solutions, including Partners for Production Agriculture, Biwer, and Austin Data Labs, at Iowa Pork Congress this January. If you’d like to schedule a meeting with founder Joel Stave at the conference to learn more about what PrairiE Systems and Ever.Ag can do for you, please contact [email protected].

About Ever.Ag 

Ever.Ag is Everything Agriculture, providing software and services that empower your entire supply chain, from farm to table – and everything in between. The breadth and depth of Ever.Ag’s solutions empower dairy, crops, animal protein, and agribusiness customers to feed a growing world. Bringing decades of experience and industry-leading innovation to the table, Ever.Ag’s advanced technology, risk management, and market intelligence solutions provide customers with the insight they need to operate more efficiently, sustainably, nimbly, and strategically across the supply chain.

About PrairiE Systems 

PrairiE Systems specializes in animal management, feed management, and feed supply chain management for pork producers. Their flagship products include the Feed Allocation System (FAS) and Smart Order e-procurement system, all designed to enhance efficiency and productivity in pork production.

The 33rd World Pork Expo is underway for the first time since 2018, and event planners have worked diligently to make sure the event is as biosecure as possible.

On Wednesday, AgriTalk host Chip Flory asked swine veterinarian, Brandi Burton, DVM, Suidae Health and Production, Algona, Iowa, to rate the pork industry on its success and progress in addressing biosecurity concerns, disease issues and technology use. Here are four questions Burton addressed during the discussion.

What’s the status on porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS)?
“At least in the Midwest, where I practice, PRRS is really a struggle right now,” Burton reports. “There’s a strain out there that just seems to break all biosecurity measures that we’ve put in place, and it’s just making its way around. So we’re doing our best to handle it, but this season right now is kind of atypical for the industry.”

The Prairie Systems User Conference was held on May 11 at the Sheraton in West Des Moines and was a great success! We had just under 70 attendees for the 9-hour event. We started the morning with introductions of the Prairie Systems team and then had a keynote presentation from Casey Niemann, President of AgriSync, who shared his insights on the topic: A conversation about the human element in agriculture. How our customer changed in the year that was.

After lunch, we presented a brief introduction of each software solution and then held concurrent, 2-hour breakout sessions allowing deeper discussion around each product. Highlights from those sessions are below.

Feed Allocation System (FAS) Breakout Session

The FAS breakout session had the largest attendance we have ever had since we started doing breakout sessions with over 30 users and prospects representing a variety of different roles from feed order desk users to management personnel. The session kicked off with an overview of the top new enhancements from 2020-2021 and the discussion filled the two-hour time block with several users participating in the forum and shared how they are using the features and key learnings from doing so. It was a great session of networking, learning and feedback for those in attendance and the Prairie Systems team.

Smart Order Breakout Session

The Smart Order session was a smaller group but was able to be customized based on the requests of the participants in the room. This provided an opportunity for users to share with each other the functionality they are actively using and benefitting from. A highlight of this setting for the Prairie Systems team was witnessing several ‘light bulb moments’ as a result of customer-to-customer sharing. Additionally, this provided an opportunity for some prospects to watch current customer interactions, and this definitely generated some added interest in the Smart Order solution.

LeeO Breakout Session

During the LeeO session the Prairie Systems team kicked off by sharing new LeeO features and answering multiple questions from the audience. Next, was an opportunity for our more ‘seasoned’ users to share their experience and findings with the more novice users and prospects in attendance. We shared about progress made with LeeO to acquire new animal registrations over the last several years. Overall, there was great discussion which enlightened potential new users and generated much discussion amongst existing users.

Following the breakout sessions, we concluded the event with some giveaways and closing comments and moved to the networking event until 7pm. Immediate feedback received from multiple attendees was very positive and expressed appreciation for the event!

(1) FAS – GVL LabLink HIMS integration – Visibility of illness and test results received from diagnostic labs available in real time in the FAS for making the best decisions about a pig flow’s health protocol.

(2) FAS Group Projection Flag –Better control for market pigs vs breeding stock that doesn’t follow a staged feeding budget.

(3) FAS Invoice Report – Add Customer PO Field: leveraging data only FAS brings together from the FAS feed order, the toll mill vendor and imported invoice to show a complete validated detail record of the nutrition presented to the animals.

(4) FAS User Security – Last Login: better visibility and maintenance of who’s who in your FAS site for more timely user security updates (remove / deactivate old users).

(5) FAS Inventory Link Tool – Tie an FAS inventory record (such as a sale) to a financial receipt record (packer payment) to deliver closeout data in FAS – both financial and group performance KPIs.

(6) FAS Group Production Type – Ability to label FAS groups according to your operational descriptions (nursery, finisher, replication) for a more complete analysis capability (filter by group production type, compare apples to apples).

(7) FAS Invoice and Vendor Integration Updates – Expand the already industry leading outbound order format and received feed invoice formats to accept even greater number of vendor systems types. Examples: FBS, QuickBooks, AgVance.

(8) FAS Scheduled Sales Report – Ability to bulk update: enhanced the scheduled sales tool in FAS to allow bulk edits around planned animal sales when the plans need to change a bit… no longer sale by sale. Example: Make a sweeping change if the weather doesn’t cooperate or a packer is closed.

(9) FAS Sales Projection – Implemented automatic sales distribution logic to help plan when you need to start marketing your animals based on a variety of easy to use performance characteristics.

(10) FAS Order Validation Updates – Further expansion of the feed desk best friend – FAS Order Validation – helping show where a budget is exhausted (“no days left in budget rule”) and a decision is made / guided how to extend feeding through sale of animals.

(11) FAS Survey Enhancements – Implemented several user suggested to make the FAS Survey tool even more friendly for the farm user or the administrative side. What’s FAS Survey? The best tool to learn what you don’t know FAST about your operation – a perfect replacement for paper forms and checklists on the farm that can help assure your PQA compliance.

(12) FAS File Sweeper – Tired of attaching files and sending emails? Let the sweeper help – quickly and securely uploads documents from your computer to one (or more) FAS installs. Examples: Invoice exports, nutrition updates.

From FeedStuffs.com

The project is unique in that it brings the cutting-edge concept of fetal imprinting to an implementation level for commercial sow farms.

Pork producers and industry professionals have expressed the need to decrease pre-weaning mortality rates in piglets, and University of Minnesota researchers are uniquely poised to take on the challenge. In previous research, Minnesota researchers showed that elevated levels of zinc in the sow’s diet during pregnancy positively influences pig performance after birth, this new research project aims to determine the timing and duration of zinc that may influence “fetal imprinting” to optimize health and performance. 

The team will explore practical applications of zinc supplementation that adds little to no extra cost to producers yet reduces pre-weaning pig mortality. This project is unique in that it brings the cutting-edge concept of fetal imprinting to an implementation level for commercial sow farms, allowing producers to positively influence lifetime performance of their pigs prior to birth. All animals in the study will be fitted with the latest in precision technology from PrairiE Systems of Spencer, Iowa, allowing researchers to closely monitor health, weight, and performance.

“PrairiE Systems is excited to partner with the University of Minnesota West Central Research and Outreach Center on this project. We believe our solution, LeeO, will provide this trial with more accurate readings, along with time and labor savings. We anticipate this research project, being conducted with zinc, will be incredibly beneficial to the industry and we look forward to the results,” reports Joel Stave, Managing Director of PrairiE Systems LLC.

Leading the project is Dr. Lee Johnston, professor of swine nutrition at the University of Minnesota West Central Research & Outreach Center (WCROC), Morris. Contributing partners include Pedro Urriola, Moon-Suhn Ryu, Kelsey Hammers, and Andres Gomez, all from the University of Minnesota, and Mark Schwartz of Schwartz Farms, Sleepy Eye, Minn.

The study will be conducted on a commercial, farrow-to-wean sow farm owned by Schwartz Farms, Inc. Results of the study will be available on the WCROC website at www.wcroc.cfans.umn.edu

Funding for this project is provided by the Pork Checkoff through the Minnesota Pork Board.

By Molly Blanchfield, Software Product Manager

The holiday season is fast approaching!  This is the time of year that many of us pull out holiday decorations around the office and dust off our address lists in preparation for sending out holiday greetings.  This is also a great time to review and update your User list in FAS!

Have you had any mobile users that are no longer working with your company?  Any employees that have left the company or moved to different roles?  Reviewing your user list, and the security settings for the users in your system, on a routine basis is recommended so that you can be confident that only people that should be accessing your data are able to do so.

Access your user list under System Administration>User Security.  The simplest way to review all your users and their security settings is to export the user list using the Export to CSV (Detail) option.

This export produces a comprehensive list of all active users complete with each user’s Contact Information, Content Restriction and Page Permissions.

To De-active a user that does not currently need access to your FAS system, but may need to have access again in the future, click on the Account Status and change it from Active to Inactive.

To Remove an unactive user from your FAS system completely, select the Delete button.

We also recommend reviewing our help document on managing mill holiday delivery schedules using our Vendor Blackout Dates feature.  You can find it in the FAS Help Center or through this link! Managing Feed Through A Holiday

As usual, for any questions about these features or other features in FAS, please contact our support team by email at [email protected] or by phone at (800) 278-5219.