HARVENTISEvery polyhouse has a spray register. Very few have a spray record. The difference is who writes it and when.
In most farms we have visited, the register is filled in by the owner or supervisor at the end of the day, or the end of the week, from what they remember the sprayer telling them. The chemical is usually right. The dose is approximately right. The beds are “all” or “the back half”. The time is a guess. And when a buyer asks about the pre-harvest interval on a batch, the honest answer is a reconstruction.
This matters more every year. Buyers ask for residue records. Export packhouses require them. And the farmer who can show exactly what went on which bed, when, and at what dose, is the farmer who gets the repeat order when something goes wrong elsewhere.
Why the log gets written afterwards
It is not laziness. A paper log asks for too much at the wrong moment. The sprayer has gloves on, a tank on their back and a mask on their face. The register is in the office. By the time they reach it, the details have blurred into “the usual mix”.
So the first rule of a useful spray log is that it has to be filled in where the spraying happens, by the person spraying, within a minute of finishing. Anything else is a story.
What the entry needs — and what it does not
We cut our field log down to the fields that change a decision:
- What: the product, picked from a list, not typed. Typing is where names get mangled.
- How much: dose and water volume. Two numbers.
- Where: the beds, tapped on a list. “All” is allowed, but it is a choice, not a default.
- Who and when: filled in automatically. The phone knows.
- A photo: optional, of the label or the mixing. Worth more than any note when a question comes later.
Everything else — weather, growth stage, reason — is useful but optional. The moment an optional field becomes mandatory, the whole log stops being filled.
The pre-harvest interval does the rest
Once the log is reliable, the pre-harvest interval stops being something you have to remember. Each product carries its interval; each spray entry carries its beds and date. The system can simply refuse to show a bed as harvestable until the interval has passed, or at least warn loudly. That single check is worth the whole exercise. It is the difference between a residue problem being impossible and being likely.
The field is offline
One practical note that decides whether any of this works: polyhouse plastic and steel do bad things to mobile signal. A log that needs a connection to save will be abandoned the first time it spins. The entry has to save on the phone instantly and sync later, without the worker thinking about it. We learnt this the hard way, which is why Harventis queues every field entry locally and shows a small count of what is waiting to go up.
Start with the list
If you do one thing this week, make the product list. Every chemical and fertiliser you use, with its dose and its pre-harvest interval, on one page. Pin it in the mixing area. Half the value of a spray log is that the person mixing has the right numbers in front of them before they start. The record is just proof that they used them.