Editorial policy
AgricultureID Journal is the editorial layer of AgricultureID. The knowledge base describes what is true of a crop, an authority, a register or a dataset. The Journal reports what changed, explains what a number means, and says where the official record stops.
Formats are claims
Every publication carries a format, and the format decides what the item must supply before it can be built. A regulatory update that does not state whether the rule is in force does not pass validation. A market brief without a source does not pass validation. A research note must say what kind of study it describes.
The format also decides the structured data. Only genuinely time-sensitive formats are marked as NewsArticle; everything else is an Article. Labelling a guide as news to court a rich result would be telling a search engine something untrue about the content.
| Format | Structured data type |
|---|---|
| News | NewsArticle |
| Feature | Article |
| Article | Article |
| Research note | Article |
| Data note | Article |
| Market brief | NewsArticle |
| Regulatory update | NewsArticle |
| Policy update | NewsArticle |
| Crop feature | Article |
| Livestock feature | Article |
| Input update | NewsArticle |
| Climate brief | Article |
| Guide | Article |
| Interview | Article |
| Analysis | Article |
| AgricultureID update | Article |
| Correction | NewsArticle |
What we will not do
- Manufacture news from evergreen material. An explanation of how growing degree days are computed is useful and is not news. Dating it as though it were would be a small dishonesty repeated every time.
- Present a forecast as an observation. Where a figure is a projection, an estimate or a provisional value, the page says so beside the figure, not in a footnote.
- Turn one study into a consensus. A research note reports what a study found and links the primary paper. Whether it was peer reviewed is stated above the text.
- Present a proposal as a rule. Regulatory items carry a stage — proposal, consultation, adopted, in force, superseded — and the stage is shown before the description of what the measure does.
- Infer impact from exposure. We can report that a state was assessed as being in drought. What that did to a particular field depends on crop stage, soil moisture, irrigation and management, and we do not take that step.
- Give advice. Nothing here is agronomic advice, legal advice or investment advice. Where a decision depends on an official register or a product label, the register or the label is the authority and we say so.
Duplication with the knowledge base
The canonical account of an entity lives on the main platform. A crop feature adds reporting, context or a look at what the sources contain; it does not restate the encyclopedia entry. Publications link into canonical entities through typed fields rather than through keywords placed in prose.
Drafting, and the use of AI
Editorial tooling, including AI assistance, may be used in research, drafting and checking. It is not used to publish. Every item is reviewed against the sources cited on the page before it reaches a public URL, and there is no pipeline anywhere in this system that turns a crawl into a published article without a person deciding to publish it.
Images
Where a publication carries an image, the page carries its credit and its source. An image without attribution is not published.
Corrections
Corrections are visible on the item and listed on the corrections page. See also the sourcing policy.