Fertilizer Company Uses RFID for Yard Management

John Taylor Fertilizers has deployed an RFID solution to keep track of agricultural equipment at its Yuba City, Calif., facility and at customer sites. The solution will help the company prevent equipment loss and improve efficiency.

The central California-based company, a unit of Wilbur-Ellis, provides chemicals and fertilizers to growers throughout the state. The company also provides sprayers, conveyors, dispensers, and tanks to its customers, which move in and out of its equipment yard throughout the growing season.

The equipment is dropped at grower sites, then picked up later by John Taylor staff who either return the equipment to the yard or deliver it to another location. Because the company services more than 700 growers, it was difficult to keep track of which items were at which location using the old paper-based tracking system, and several expensive pieces of equipment usually turned up missing each year. It was also difficult to determine how often items were being used. This resulted in underutilized assets, delayed customer response times and unnecessary purchases of new equipment.

"We were losing a lot of smaller equipment, like the 550 gallon tanks on wheels or injection pumps," says Craig Niesen, service manager at John Taylor Fertilizers. "Our old system was based on a whiteboard in our office, and it wasn't really that effective."

The company has deployed the OnSite RFID solution from systems integrator InCom and Intelleflex to automatically track equipment in the yard. OnSite was developed by InCom based on the Intelleflex RFID platform.

"We finally have a system that allows us to keep accurate track of our equipment. We haven't lost visibility to a single piece of equipment since the system has been installed," Niesen says. "Other benefits of OnSite include the ability to account for the usage of each piece of equipment, allowing more effective equipment purchase planning and an accurate calculation of return on our related investments."

Niesen first learned about the solution when he saw it in action at Bear River Supply, an agricultural equipment supply company in Rio Oso, Calif. Bear River is using the Intelleflex tags and readers to track equipment in its yard and at customer sites.

RFID tags have been attached to each item, and John Taylor has installed RFID readers at the gate to its equipment yard to record each time anything leaves or enters the yard. Employees can also use hand-held computers to record when an item has been moved from one grower site to another.

The system went live in January. So far, the company has tagged 200 items, with several hundred more items to be tagged before next spring.

"Before, if the growers didn't call in to say they were done with the equipment, we'd have to go out and try to figure out where the missing items were," Niesen says. "Now we have a reference point to go back to."

Even for larger tanks and other equipment, the RFID tags provide valuable information about how often items being used and how long they were at a customer site. And although there is a significant amount of metal in the equipment yard, Niesen says there have been no problems reading the tags.

"Like many outdoor locations, the yards at John Taylor present formidable challenges for the deployment of RFID systems. These include exposure to the elements, reading around metallic equipment, required long read/write ranges and constant physical handling," said Craig Kavanaugh, senior director, western region at Intelleflex. "But our extended capability RFID platform is designed specifically for these challenging environments, delivering the performance, robust operation and feature richness to get the job done in the toughest circumstances. I am pleased that we've been able to meet John Taylor's business goals as a result."

Eventually, John Taylor will also roll out a maintenance tracking application that uses the RFID tags to record any repair work done to each piece of equipment.

"We usually lose two or three injection pumps at $1,600 a piece, and a few tank trailers," Niesen says. "The only thing we're missing this year is a spray rig that went out before we tagged the equipment. With the price of fuel now, if we don't have to run around looking for equipment, it saves us time and money."