Your agronomists' advice, as a record you can defend.
For the distributor, retailer or agency network whose product is advice that ends in a sale — and has to survive an audit.
A crop-protection distributor does not really sell chemistry. It sells the judgement of an agronomist who walks the block, names a target, chooses an active and a dose, and writes it down — and then a sale follows from that judgement. That advice is the product, the margin and the liability all at once, and in most of the industry it lives in an email, a WhatsApp photograph or a duplicate book in the back of a bakkie.
That is not a records problem. Selling a remedy for a use other than the one on its label is an offence by the seller, not the buyer, and across a franchised or agency network that exposure is distributed across dozens of independent advisors while the registrations sit at head office. The audit standard your growers are certified against already requires the application record to name the person who decided the use and the dose — and accepts an email as proof of their competence, which is exactly why nobody has ever structured it.
FuroField turns that decision into an object: who recommended what, under which credential, against which target, for which destination market, and whether the grower accepted it. The verdict the advisor was shown at the moment they decided is frozen into the record and never recomputed, because re-deriving it later quietly rewrites what a person knew when they made the call — which is the one thing an audit is actually asking about.
The advice is a legal act, and nothing makes it auditable
Six registers describe the life of an agricultural input — what was advanced on credit, what may legally be sprayed and at what interval, who supplied it, what a cohort should buy, what was actually applied, and whether the lot is still sellable into its market. Almost nobody joins them, and none of them records the human who decided. When an active is withdrawn or a residue query lands, the answer is assembled by phone.
- Recommendations issued as free text, with no link to the product register that says what is legal
- Off-label exposure distributed across independent advisors, sitting on head office's registrations
- Advisor accreditations and operator certificates expiring with nothing watching them
- No way to answer which growers' programmes just broke when an active is withdrawn
- Sold-quantity returns and rebate accrual reconciled in email, from the one dataset only the distributor holds
From first record to something you can act on
Register the advisors, and their interest
Each advisor organisation carries its kind, its accreditation and expiry, and a declared funding interest — whether the person giving the advice is paid out of the margin on what they recommend. The declaration is a database constraint, not a convention, and it renders at the same weight as the advice everywhere the advice appears.
Issue the recommendation against the register
The advisor picks a target and a product from the registered-product register rather than typing a name. The gate runs before the commit: label rate, pre-harvest and re-entry intervals, resistance group, destination-market residue limit, operator certificate. What the advisor was told is stored with the recommendation.
Let the grower accept it
A recommendation is a proposal, never a write. It creates nothing on the farm until the grower accepts, and only then can it attach to a task or a demand line. A recommendation the recipient never agreed to is advice, and it stays labelled as advice.
Read the exposure, not the archive
Four views: what is breaching a gate now, what advice is live, what an active being pulled would cost across the book, and what was recommended by whom. The withdrawal-impact list is the one that turns a fortnight of phone calls into a screen.
In detail
A recommendation of record
Who decided, under what credential, against which target, for which market, and whether the grower agreed — the link GLOBALG.A.P. IFA CB 7.3.4 makes mandatory and leaves entirely unshaped.
Withdrawal impact across the book
When a registration is pulled or a market moves a residue limit, the programmes that just broke are a query rather than a call list — with the growers, blocks and advisors already attached.
A consent edge you cannot award yourself
The farm grants the mandate, narrows its scope, pauses it and revokes it. A supplier reads inside that scope and writes nothing; the mutating routes answer 403 to the supplier by design. A consent the interested party can grant itself is not consent.
The competitor rule, enforced in the read path
A grower buys from several distributors. You see your own advisors' recommendations on that farm and never a rival's — filtered in the query and again in the row-level policy, not by a flag somebody could set. There is deliberately no scope key that widens it.
An access log on the farm's trail
Every cross-tenant read is written onto the grower's own audit trail — allowed or refused, with the row count — by the read path itself, so a reader cannot decline to be logged. A mandate list says who may look; only this says who did.
Advice described, never steered
The mix view carries no price, no cost, no margin and no supplier ranking. A screen that ranked advice by margin would make the funding-interest disclosure a lie, and that disclosure is the part a manufacturer's own platform structurally cannot offer.
Built for these operations
About input suppliers & distributors
Are you selling farm software to our growers?
No, and the distinction matters commercially. This is a console over your own advisor network's advice, priced on advisors rather than on the hectares your customers farm. Your growers do not have to adopt anything for a recommendation to be recorded; where a grower does run FuroField, a mandate they grant lets you see the advice your own people gave them, and nothing else.
We have already invested in an agronomy or imagery platform. Does this replace it?
It should not, and we will say so in the first meeting rather than the third. Satellite imagery, scouting apps and agronomy planners answer what is happening in the field. This answers who decided, under what authority, and what breaks when a registration moves — which is an assurance question, and it composes with a platform you already own instead of competing with it.
Do you take a margin on the products our advisors recommend?
Never. No commission, no rebate and no referral fee from any input or technology supplier, which is the reason a funding-interest disclosure on this platform is worth anything at all. Advice with an undisclosed interest in the answer is not advice, and that applies to us before it applies to anyone on your network.
Can we see this working before committing?
The recommendation of record, the advisor register and the consent mandate are live on the production API and test-pinned. The supplier-side console is the open edge — it signs in and lands on a farm workspace rather than a network view, and wiring it is scoped pilot work rather than a roadmap intention. We would rather tell you that now than have you find it in a security review.
What about the residue limits for the markets our growers export into?
The gate is built and the reference authority is populated. Market-scoped checks against a commercial registration database report unavailable and name the authority they could not reach, rather than returning a pass — an absent check must never look like a clear one. Closing that is a subscription, and it is on the pilot's cost line, not hidden in ours.
Related
Bring your fields online this season
Start free on up to 25 hectares — no card. Scale by the hectare as your operation grows.