Endowed with conventional testing facilities, advanced equipment and high-performance instruments, the lab provides a wide range of testing programs for soils, crop plants, fertilizers, irrigation water and other agricultural materials. Standard processing procedures have been established to process huge amount of samples, including soil analysis for pH, electrical conductivity, solvent extraction, acid decomposition, etc., reaching 100-300 samples a day. The testing programs support not only the research work of the institute, but also the analytical and diagnostic services provided to farmers. To augment the application of acquired soil survey data, the lab is incorporating the digitalized maps of productivity classification of rice fields and updated cultivated soils into the agricultural geographic information system (GIS). The enhanced agricultural GIS is being utilized to estimate the requirement of agricultural calcareous soils in Taiwan, and to establish the database for agricultural soil fertility, soil and plant tissue analysis service system, and high-quality spatial climate gridded data sets in the country.
