A new product arrives on the farm, and everything Intecrop needs to know about it is already printed on the drum: the actives and their concentrations, the formulation, the registration number, the gear you have to wear to handle it. All of it in type too small to read comfortably, and all of it having to end up in a form.
You can now photograph the label instead.
How it works
Go to Tradenames and click New. Above the form there is a panel: Read the fields off a label photo. Upload a photo you took on your phone, or the PDF the supplier emailed you, click Read from label, and a few seconds later the form is filled in.
Then you check it — which is the point of filling in a form rather than saving a product. Nothing is recorded by uploading a picture. You read what came back, fix anything it got wrong, and submit. It then goes to an Intecrop administrator for approval, because a product record is shared by every farm on the system — Where products come from covers why that is, and where to watch for the answer.
So there are two sets of eyes between a photograph and a product you can use. A label read this well is a good first draft, not the last word.
The details: JPG, PNG, WebP or PDF, up to 10 MB, twenty labels per farm per day. Farm admins and managers, the same people who could already ask for a new product.
What comes back
The product name, registration number and registration holder. The formulation, the category, the specific gravity where the label states one. The precautions for preparation and for application — including on older labels, where those are little pictures of overalls and gloves rather than a list. And each active ingredient with its concentration and unit.
Where fertiliser gets tricky
Skip ahead if this is not your thing. It is here because it is the part that took the work.
A pesticide label is mostly transcription. A fertiliser label is a chemistry exam:
- Nitrate is not nitrogen.
N (nitrate) 14.4%means 14.4% nitrogen, in the nitrate form. Read it as 14.4% nitrate and you are out by more than a factor of four. The same trap sits under sulphate. - Sulphur is not sulphate. A dusting sulphur at 900 g/kg is a contact fungicide, not a nutrient. One word on the label, two completely different jobs in the field.
- Phosphorous is not phosphoric. One letter apart. One is a phosphite fungicide, the other a phosphate nutrient.
- Litres or kilograms. A label often prints the same active twice —
360 g/L (280 g/kg). Only one of those is the figure to use, and which one depends on whether the product is a liquid or a solid.
These are now read the way an agronomist reads them, and nutrients are recorded as the element. So the nitrogen in a nitrate product and the nitrogen in a urea product land on the same line of your report instead of on two.
Where the label genuinely does not say, the field comes back blank for you to fill in. A missing figure is obvious. A confidently wrong one is not.
What this does not do
It does not decide anything. It reads a label, fills in a form and hands it to you. You check it, an administrator checks it, and only then is it a product you can record an application against.
That's what it means when we say "we use AI" here: the tedious, error-prone transcription is done for you, and the judgement stays where it was.