Kentucky's first laws regarding fertilizer date back to the 1880s, and a program at the University of Kentucky has been helping enforce those and other agriculture laws since their inception.

While the Department for Regulatory Services maintains have a quiet presence, their influence in the Commonwealth runs far and wide.

Our Blake Vickers explains, we've been within the College of Agriculture since the 1890s.

So, you know, we started a long, long time ago.

The university of Kentucky's Division of Regulatory Services, or doctors, has been keeping watch over both producers and consumers within the agricultural industry for over 100 years.

Doctors services are rendered through four state agricultural regulation laws.

Our current mandated programs are feed seed, fertilizer, and milk regulations.

While ensuring fair conditions for ag producers is an important part of the doctors mission.

McMurry says protecting consumers is their top priority.

We're mainly a consumer protection agency, so we have an inspection staff of nine employees and they obtain feed, seed, fertilizer, milk samples, and they come to our laboratory and we run analyzes on those.

So it's mainly just making sure that the consumer knows exactly what they're purchasing, that they have confidence, you know, in what they are buying.

So that's confidence in their pet foods that they're purchasing.

Fertilizers, seeds.

That that in my mind is, you know, that's what makes us go.

Well, their central lab operates on the University of Kentucky's campus.

The doctors maintains a presence from Paducah to Pikeville.

Our inspection staff, we have, nine employees there, and they are located, from western Kentucky all the way to, you know, eastern Kentucky.

So they are the ones that would they obtain all the samples that we we test here for seed, fertilizer and milk.

The doctors has built relationships with agriculture producers of all sizes, serving small farms, franchise box stores and everything in between.

So when you go into a feed mill, you know, every, every two months and you're doing that for five, ten years, you know, you get to know all these people, you know, pretty personally.

We see the manufacturing process of, all those products feed seed, fertilizer, and we get to when we do obtain samples that are directly going to a farmer, we actually send those results back to them.

Farmer, that producer.

So they see the results, of whatever they're purchasing.

While sales of certain products can be halted.

McMurry says that educating producers is an important part of the doctors his work.

A lot of our work is educational.

If you're feed manufacturing and you need to do some sequencing of feeds as you make them.

We try to educate, those facilities so they can do that.

So they're properly mixing those feeds.

And in order to where you don't get contamination, that's a that's the hard part of the job, is to notify somebody that, for seed, you know, if, if the germination is under, the parameters that we have set for that.

So, yeah, stop sales are issued on those.

And in some instances they cannot be resold.

And in some instances it's just a matter of relabeling that seed, to where it can be sold if the product is wrong.

It's more our first line of, communication with them is, can we relabel it because we don't want to just send something to a landfill?

You know, if we don't have to, it's always, let's relabel it to make sure the consumer knows, you know, that's our that's what we want to do.

If it if we can.

I mean, that's where we want to strive for.

For Kentucky edition.

Blake Vickers, she puts 100ft.

The Department of Regulatory Services has also been studying hemp for the Kentucky Department of Agriculture.