Four steps, in the order you'd actually do them
Start with the planting
One crop, in one place, for one season, with a code like PL-2026-001. Grain, vegetables or fruit; annuals that run plant to harvest, or orchards and vines that stay put season after season. Field, hectares, planting date and expected harvest.
Record what goes on it
Sprays, fertiliser, irrigation, cultivation, pruning and scouting — each against the block it was applied to, with who did it, what with, and in what conditions. Wind speed is kept as a number, because drift is mostly a wind problem.
Harvest with a lot code
How much came off, in what unit, graded Class 1, 2 or 3 under the Agricultural Product Standards Act 119 of 1990, where it went and at what price. Yield per hectare and value follow from the numbers rather than being typed twice and disagreeing.
Read the season back
Harvested by crop, yield per block against its hectares, and the value of what you priced. Mixed units are never added together — crates and kilograms stay on separate lines rather than becoming one confident, meaningless total.
Spray records that survive an audit
Agricultural remedies are registered under Act 36 of 1947, and every label carries an L-number. A packhouse, an export agent or a GLOBALG.A.P. auditor can ask to see the record behind any consignment, so the fields follow what those records have to show.
- Product, active ingredient and L-number off the label
- Target pest or disease, rate as written, area treated and total used
- Operator and equipment, so the record names who applied it
- Re-entry interval, rounded up to whole days rather than invented to the hour
The withholding period, done honestly
This is the number that decides whether a load passes or is rejected on residues. isibaya does not ship a table of withholding periods and never guesses one — it varies by product, crop and dose, labels get revised, and a number wrong in the farmer’s favour reads as permission to harvest early. The label is the authority. What the app does is the arithmetic, and it does it out loud.
- A planned harvest inside a withholding period is flagged in red, with how many days short
- The warning appears while you are still typing the period, not after the sprayer is empty
- Where sprays overlap, the longest interval governs — not the most recent
- Harvesting inside the window is not silently allowed, and not hard-blocked either: it asks, and records that you confirmed
Rules for produce, with the Act named
Crop protection and remedies, produce standards and market access, plant material and varieties, records and traceability, land and water — each item citing its source so you can check the current wording yourself.
- Act 36 of 1947 for agricultural remedies and their registration
- Act 119 of 1990 for grading and product standards
- Plant Breeders’ Rights and Plant Improvement Acts for propagation material
- National Water Act 36 of 1998 where abstraction needs authorising