Grounding by construction: products, doses and windows that can be traced

A language model can produce a plausible product name and a plausible dose. On a farm, plausible is not enough: a wrong product or a wrong rate costs a harvest, money and sometimes health. This draft explains the design rule Agronomist follows and how we intend to measure it. No results are reported here yet.

The rule

Products, doses, rates, dates and spray hours come from retrieval or computation, never from the model's memory.

• Registered products are looked up per crop and per place. Outside a covered register the answer gives active ingredients and prevention guidance, and says the product list is empty rather than inventing one.
• Doses and tank fills are computed from the label rate, the sprayer and the zone areas.
• Spray hours must match a window in the field's own forecast. An hour range that cannot be traced is replaced before it is sent.

Each grounded value carries a source and an as_of. A stale as_of counts as a gap.

Gaps are said out loud

When a fact is missing (a sensor offline, a register not covered, a forecast that failed), Agronomist says so. A stated gap is a correct behaviour, not an error.

How we will measure it

The grounding track of AgroEval checks every number in every answer against the trace of the run that produced it. We will report the share of traceable values, the share of stated gaps, and every case where an untraceable value reached a farmer.