Client: Terpene Belt Farms
Use Case: California Department of Food and Agriculture compliance forms (PDFs)
Industry: Agriculture (Industrial Hemp forms)
Product Type: AI Form Filler, AI Document Automation
Annual Volume: 100+ regulated forms
Start Date: January 2025
Overview
Terpene Belt Farms manages dozens of field lots, multiple cultivation sites, and strict state and county regulatory paperwork. From planting to harvest and destruction, each step required precise documentation, often within 72-hour submission windows. Managing these manually was time-consuming and risky.
With Instafill.ai’s AI form filler, their compliance manager Sarah replaced manual data entry with smart automation that reads site layouts, tracks cultivars, and fills government PDFs using data from Smartsheets.
The Problem
Terpene Belt Farms faced more than just paperwork. Their real issue was how tedious and error-prone the process was. Each compliance form required precise information such as site APNs, GPS coordinates, cultivar types, lot sizes, planting dates, and harvest deadlines—information scattered across multiple tables and spreadsheets.
Key Pain Points:
- Time-Intensive Data Entry: Staff had to manually open blank PDFs, identify and copy-paste data from various Smartsheets, CSV files, and other internal documents—each with different layouts and formats.
- Multiple Data Sources: Cultivar lists, site descriptions, and lot details were stored separately, often in incompatible formats. Consolidating these manually led to constant formatting errors and increased risk of regulatory non-compliance.
- Rigid Form Constraints: Government PDFs offered limited rows (typically 4–6 line items per page). This meant large planting or harvest batches required multiple forms, each manually created and carefully checked to avoid mistakes.
- Dynamic Deadlines (72-Hour Windows): Destruction and harvest reports needed submission within strict 72-hour periods following events. Tracking these deadlines across multiple counties and lots created significant stress and frequent errors.
- Attachment Complexity: Due to volume constraints, most forms required supplemental attachments with additional cultivar information. Generating these attachments separately, linking them correctly, and ensuring consistency across main forms was complicated and time-consuming.
In short, managing over 95 individual SARFs plus additional compliance documents each season wasn’t just tedious—it was unsustainable and prone to costly mistakes.
Instafill.ai Solution
The core problem wasn’t just the number of forms – it was how long each one took.
Manually filling out a planting report or SARF required opening a blank PDF, copying data from Smartsheets, reformatting lot information, splitting submissions due to line limits, exporting to PDF, and uploading to DocuSign. Multiply that by 95+ lots, across multiple sites and counties, and it consumed entire weeks of staff time.
Instafill.ai automated that entire workflow.
Here’s how:
- One-Time Setup: We mapped static fields like APNs, site names, and GPS coordinates, and connected dynamic inputs like cultivar and lot data directly from the farm’s Smartsheet exports.
- AI PDF Autofill: Our system parses field logic for each form and fills them out automatically — no manual entry, formatting, or copy-pasting required.
- Attachment Handling: When forms couldn’t fit all line items (e.g., only 4–6 cultivars), Instafill auto-generated a supplemental table as a separate PDF and inserted the correct “See Attachment A” references into the main form.
- Pre-Signed Output: The completed documents are returned as signature-ready PDFs, eliminating the need to prepare DocuSign envelopes for every single form.
- Supports Form Variants: Whether it’s Contra Costa vs Alameda County, grower vs breeder, or destruction plan vs harvest report — Instafill identifies the right form variant based on context and fills it accordingly.
Before Instafill.ai, generating 95 SARFs meant 3–4 days of tedious work. Now it’s done in under 10 minutes — with no formatting errors and no missed deadlines.
Results
| Metric | Before Instafill | After Instafill |
|---|---|---|
| Time per SARF | 20–30 minutes | Under 1 minute |
| Time per Planting Report | 25–40 minutes | 2–3 minutes |
| Time per Destruction Form | 15–25 minutes | 1–2 minutes |
| Time per Harvest Report | 30–45 minutes | 3–5 minutes |
| Manual Copy-Paste | 100+ actions per season | 0 |
| Attachment Generation | Manual via Excel and PDF export | Automatic from Smartsheet |
| Deadline Miss Risk | High (manual tracking) | Near-zero (AI-driven scheduling) |
| Signature Bottlenecks | DocuSign setup for each document | Pre-signed PDF handoff (1-click) |
| Staff Hours Saved | ~50–70 hours/season | 90% reduction |
What the Client Said
“Instafill.ai turned 95 SARFs from a nightmare into a 10-minute task. The automated tables and 72-hour deadline support keep us compliant, even during rainy seasons.”
— Sarah, Compliance Manager, Terpene Belt Farms
Forms Automated by Instafill.ai
| Form Name | Deadline | Description | Annual Volume |
|---|---|---|---|
| Industrial Hemp Registration | March 15 annually | Annual renewal for grower and breeder licenses, with APN/site maps | 3 |
| Planting Report | Mid-May to July (site-based) | Lists planted cultivars per site; often filed in batches, with attachments | 6–7 |
| Destruction Plan | Immediately after planting | Pre-approval of destruction methods (e.g. composting in-field or storage) | 2–3 |
| Destruction Report | Within 72 hours of destruction | Confirms mid-season culling or post-harvest plant removal | 3–5 |
| Sample Analysis Request (SARF) | ASAP post-planting | One per lot; triggers state lab sampling. Includes cultivar, location, date | 68–95 |
| Harvest Report | Within 72 hours post-harvest | Groups multiple lots by harvest date window. Max 5–6 per form. | 10–20 |
| Final Destruction Report | After harvest, before rain season | Covers full-site cleanup and composting of residual plants | 1–3 |
Looking Ahead
- Add full e-signature support to bypass DocuSign
- Build calendar alerts for 72-hour submission windows
- Support dynamic grouping for harvest lots
- Offer industry templates for cannabis, agriculture, and biotech compliance
Need to automate dozens of government PDF forms like Terpene Belt Farms?
Try Instafill.ai – an AI document filler built for regulated industries.
Conclusion
Terpene Belt Farms didn’t need another dashboard—they needed results. Instafill.ai delivered by removing the bottlenecks that slowed down their compliance process for years. What used to take full workdays now takes minutes. No more copying between spreadsheets, no more deadline panic, and no more back-and-forth fixing PDF errors.
Whether you’re managing hemp, cannabis, or any regulated crop, the paperwork isn’t going away—but the manual work can.
Instafill.ai fills government forms so you don’t have to.
👉 Try it free to see it in action.
More Instafill.ai case studies: Legal AI Case Study: How GHNY Law Automated Client Intake Using Instafill.ai – Instafill ai form filler blog