Bismarck, N.D. — The North Dakota Department of Agriculture (NDDA) has taken over effective Jan. 1 the inspection of anhydrous ammonia tanks and facilities in addition to enforcing state laws and regulations and licensing of these facilities, and is equipped with upgraded computer software to make the task easier for both sides. The transfer from the insurance department was approved by last year’s state legislature, requiring any dealer, applicator, or user with storage for 6,000 gallons or more to obtain a license from NDDA. “As with our pesticide program, we intend to take a proactive approach to anhydrous ammonia regulation,” said Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring. “In the coming year, the department will conduct an extensive education and outreach effort to help anhydrous users better understand and comply with the law.” NDDA had Kelly Registration Systems modify the existing computer system to include such features as identifying inspection reports for an unlimited number of tanks at a specific location or under a specific licensee, printing all licensees and past inspection dates, using UPCs and product names to conduct business inspections, printing stop-sales notices, and producing administrative reports related to inspection activities and statistics, as required by the state. The Kelly system has been in operation for two years now for fertilizer, pesticides, feed products for registering feed retailers, fertilizer distributors, and anhydrous ammonia distributors. “The new program is going to be an enforcement platform for recording inspections of anhydrous ammonia facilities,” explained fertilizer specialist Spencer Wagner. “With Kelly fertilizer registrants have been able to submit online or they can send us in hard copies which we upload into the system. This provides a very efficient contact system and label review. It also puts it in to the public side of Kelly so any user can access the information, which would tell if the product is registered in the state, search it by name, dealer, and amount of nitrogen, phos, or potassium. They could put in ‘I want something with 20 percent’ and it would bring up every product available with this amount of nitrogen. With anhydrous, this database can quickly and efficiently find past inspections and information on those inspections, and that cut down on paper use as well. This is strictly an inspection database for us to look up what tanks and what facilities were last inspected in a given year. It also allows us to track the number of violations so we can categorize the violations that would indicate that additional training is needed or if the training information was sufficient to the user. The retail outlets can do everything online except for the onsite inspections.”
Transparency Across the Fertilizer Value-Chain