A product name is not an authorisation

AgricultureID has read 43,591 authorisation records out of official plant protection registers. It is one of the larger things the platform holds. It is also the layer we are most careful about, because the question people arrive with — can I use this product on this crop — is one the data cannot answer, and answering it anyway would be the most dangerous thing the platform could do.

Three things that are not each other

An active substance is a chemical. In the European Union it is approved, or not approved, at Union level under Regulation (EC) No 1107/2009. Approval means the substance may be used in products — it does not put a single product on a single shelf.

A product is a formulation containing one or more active substances, sold under a brand name. Products are authorised nationally. Article 28(1) of the same regulation is explicit: a plant protection product shall not be placed on the market or used unless it has been authorised in the member state concerned.

An authorisation is a national decision about a specific product, listing the crops it may be used on, the pests it may be used against, the maximum rate, the number of applications, intervals, buffer zones and conditions. Two countries can authorise the same product with materially different terms. One can withdraw it while the other renews it.

A product name carries none of that. It is a label on a can.

The name is not even stable

The registers make this concrete. The same brand name recurs across countries attached to different formulations, and across time attached to different active substances after a reformulation. A search that matched on name alone would return records that are genuinely about different things, each looking equally official, each carrying a real register identifier.

We hit the same trap in a different layer with variety names — where 57% of exact name matches across official registers turned out to be different botanical species — and the lesson transferred: match on the identifier the register uses, never on the name a human recognises.

What AgricultureID does instead

The platform records which authority operates which register, what a register publishes, and what a given record says on the date it was read. It links to the official record. It does not restate the conditions of use, and it does not compute whether a use is permitted.

That is a real limitation and we would rather state it than blur it. The register is the authority. A page that summarised an authorisation into "approved for cereals" would be wrong in ways that matter — the omitted rate, the omitted interval, the omitted buffer zone — and would be wrong while looking helpful.

If you need to know whether you may use a product, the answer is in the national register, on the label, and nowhere else. AgricultureID's job is to tell you which register, and to be honest that it is not a substitute for it.