Shawnee Mission, Kansas
April 30, 2003

"Our mission is to help growers nationwide add value to their crops by placing current and historical cropping data at their fingertips," says Chuck Jenkins, General Manager of Marketing and Sales for CropVerifeye, LLC ."The Heritage™ program is helping growers from the Pacific Northwest to the Corn Belt to Florida track important historical cropping information which adds value to their crops and dollars to their operation's net profit."The inexpensive CropVerifeye™ Heritage™ Program allows growers to document their production practices and processes by collecting data from their farming operations and storing them in Heritage's fully secured Web-enabled database.

"The information growers gather and collect over a period of years provides the basis for a comprehensive cropping history database for their farms," says Jenkins. "This database can be an important tool for marketing value-enhanced crops, improving bottom-line numbers and for supporting and strengthening production contract opportunities with customers such as food processors, seed companies, and others in the field-to-fork food chain."

In addition, to the historical cropping system database that producers create with the Heritage Program, it also:

• Provides information for securing operating loans, supporting insurance applications and claims, and tendering offers for land rental
• Provides records for future environmental farm plans
• Establishes a value for each farm enterprise

According to Jenkins, the Heritage Program comes with an option to enter information either directly online or to use hand-held personal digital assistants (PDA's) as data-collection devices. Use of Heritage provides customers with access to the Heritage internet database if they so choose. This database is secured by unique passwords and user names for each subscriber. All data remain the sole property of each participating customer, yet they are available for sharing with business constituents to improve financial positions and returns. Customers can also capitalize on CropVerifeye's data storage capabilities while controlling access to the data by trusted parties. The underlying theme of the product is to streamline record keeping practices and maximize profit-generating opportunities. Current users compliment the ease of use and the short learning curve for the program, yet appreciate the security and accessibility to business partners as they continue to optimize efficiency. They also like the affordability of the program. The software sells for $525.00 and there are minimal per-acre charges for data uploading and sharing.

Aledo, Illinois crop producer Steve Staker utilizes the Heritage Program and says, "Currently we're using it on 1,200 acres of dry field peas, corn, and non GM soybeans. Our intention is to get a premium on them, marketing through a regional producer organization. We're in our second year building a historical cropping database so the homework's done and our cropping résumé's in place. We're able to assure value-added buyers what they're getting."

Ron Pierce, Marengo, Illinois grain grower says, "Heritage has saved money, letting me look at different herbicide options for any field and letting me see what the cost does by adding a chemical or deleting or changing rates.That way I can see what the cost is before I make an application decision. It has saved us money by documenting chemicals used and running a report for the chemical rep to show how much we used and how much we had to re-spray. They covered that cost."

CropVerifeye, LLC, is a privately held company offering Web-enabled, ISO 9000-equivalent services to  the agricultural and food processing industries. With offices in Wichita, Kan., Shawnee Mission, Kan., Ft. Wayne, Ind., and Mahomet, Ill., CropVerifeye provides verification, validation and field-to-food traceability of crop and food products.