In my role at Agworld I am in contact with a wide variety of growers and ag consultants from all over the United States, who are working with a multitude of crops, which means I'm sure to learn something new every day! There are also a number of unifying topics however that seem to get raised in many conversations across the country, and 'compliance' is one that plays an increasingly important role in many farming operations across the country.

Whether you are growing organic or biological crops, exporting nuts or fruit, supplying potatoes to a processor or supplying barley to a malting facility, or, like in my case, just following your state's requirements; certain rules apply to the way you grow crops and the inputs you utilize, and you have to remain compliant with these regulations in order to be able to produce or sell your crop. While comprehensive compliance instructions are usually provided pre-season for each crop or variety, it can be easy to lose sight of a small detail during the season and when it comes to compliance even small details can have big implications.

At Agworld we have recognized this shift in the agricultural landscape towards compliance-driven crop-specific regulation, and are focusing our development efforts on this part of our product. Where some providers might simply use product-label data to indicate whether a specific product is allowed to be used on a crop, we have recognized that in a lot of cases it can be 'legal' to apply a product according to it's label instructions, but it would still make a crop non-compliant for specific buyers, export markets, or processors. With this in mind, we have started the roll-out of Agworld 'strategies' - and I'm sure you'll be just as excited about this as I am!

Agworld strategies is currently still 'feature toggled', meaning that you can choose to use or not use it and is available to early adopters / those open to a beta product while we're working on developing it further, and we will make further announcements when released to all users as a staple feature in future.

What it allows you to do is create a strategy for a specific crop, variety, or specific fields with management practices that differ from other fields such as organic production. These strategies can then be viewed on your maps page and your activity forms as well. For each of these individual 'strategies' you can create rules to restrict specific products from getting used on a field throughout the season. And, if someone breaks this rule, you'll immediately get a notification.

So what's the advantage of all of this for you? With Agworld strategies you can create custom strategies with restricted products for as many crops or varieties as you like, and then apply them to any field that needs to adhere to this strategy. Strategies gives you more flexibility and depth in how you can plan and manage your crops, which also opens up more visibility of performance at the end of the season. You will also gain more visibility into specialty crops, or crops that are grown/managed in a different way, without having to dig through old notes or instructions, or having to call in specialized knowledge.

Strategies can be created by both growers and agronomists, and therefore add another dimension to Agworld's unique collaborative approach. Compliance is all about putting guard rails around the way you manage your crops, and needs to give you the possibility to select exactly how you want to manage your crops in order to ensure that you remain compliant at all times; Agworld now offers you this.

If you feel that 'Agworld strategies' could be useful for your operation and you'd like to learn more about how to start using this feature, please don't hesitate to get in touch with our customer success team!