One of the newest tenants in NDSU's Research and Technology Park is Feed Management Systems, a company whose technology helped track the first suspected case of "mad cow" disease in the country.

The Brooklyn Center, Minn.-based business is the world's leading provider of feed management software and services for the livestock industry.

The company's software development staff - responsible for the design, programming, development and testing of its products - has been moved to Fargo. The Fargo office is being housed in temporary space until the Research Park's proposed 50,000-square-foot incubator space is completed in 2006.

Nearly 4,000 feed industry users - 70 percent of the North American market, 90 percent of the South American market and 60 percent of the total worldwide market - rely on one or more Feed Management Systems products.

FMS, as it is commonly called, is perhaps best known for its role in the 2003 case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy. FMS software's tracing methods helped prove an infected cow in Washington state had not eaten feed suspected of spreading the disease.

"They were running our ERP solution there and were able to trace it back," said Duey Yliniemi, head of development for FMS in Fargo.

The software's efficacy in the mad cow scare has earned it top honors for food safety innovation within the commercial feed industry. It's the latest highlight for a business that has grown markedly in recent years.

FMS was launched in 1986 as a one-person custom programming service in Fairmount, Minn. Rich Reynertson came onboard as CEO in 2001 to take the company through Chapter 11 restructuring. Today, the company has 34 employees across the country and $5 million in annual revenue.

FMS' product line is designed to help ingredient manufacturers, feed mills, brokers and producers to formulate, balance, allocate, order and create sophisticated nutritional feed products for today's agricultural market. The proper formulation and use of feed ingredients is essential, as each ingredient contributes its own nutrient level and impacts the quality and price of an animal feed-ration program, Reynertson says.

With the company's ties to Microsoft-Great Plains, FMS officials were eager to move offices here. The board of the North Dakota Development Fund provided another carrot when it approved a $150,000 equity investment for FMS in 2002. "Fargo is a great place to be if you're a software developer," Reynertson said.

He believes FMS' close proximity to NDSU also will be beneficial. The university's strong agricultural program, the Research Park's technological expertise and the college's School of Food Safety all can provide valuable resources, he said.

Reynertson says the company's potential for growth is enormous. The software's ability to track the origin, processing location, order history and destination of feed ingredients could be expanded to monitor foods for human consumption. "The food supply in the U.S. is incredibly safe today, and it's also incredibly vulnerable," Reynertson says. "The country that has an affordable, high-quality, safe food supply ultimately wins the game. If you lose any of those three, you can't sustain your population."

This story contains information from Forum news reports.