After publishing “From Data Hoarding to Decision Power: What Farmers Need in 2026” on the Global Ag Tech Initiative last month, I received messages from growers, advisors and others (thank you, I appreciate every message I get!). Interestingly, there was a common theme among quite a few of these responses that I had not expected: “yeah, sure we need to use data to help inform decisions but, and maybe more importantly, why don't we start with using it to bring our compliance workload down?” After thinking about this for a while, it makes sense to me: compliance isn't just paperwork anymore, it's a source of operational risk, margin pressure, and can add-up to a real business cost. But, like some of you told me, the data to manage compliance lives everywhere but in one place.

So again, the problem is not about collecting more data, it's about turning it into auditable records to make compliance a quick and easy process.

Compliance is not a back-office exercise

Regulatory complexity is rising across North America. Whether you're working under California's stringent DPR rules, navigating drift-sensitive areas in the Midwest, or preparing for USDA or processor audits in the Upper Midwest, compliance obligations touch every part of the growing season. If you've ever scrambled to gather spray records, label information, restriction intervals, and application contexts for an inspection, you know how painful it can be without good systems. But here's the shift that's happening: compliance shouldn't be something you do after the fact, it needs to be part of how you plan and execute from the very start of your season. Compliance data should be generated in the field as part of the regular workflow. That means:

• Capturing inputs and activities at the moment of application
• Checking label constraints and safety requirements before they become errors
• Tying every activity to field and crop context so audit reports build themselves

Modern farm management information systems that link planning, execution, and reporting, eliminate frantic audits and reduce errors that cost money, risk fines or worse. This doesn't require extra work, it requires better workflows!

Make compliance a byproduct of good in-field workflows

One of the reasons compliance falls apart on some farms is that record keeping is sometimes treated like an add-on, after the fact. Paper notebooks, Excel logs, PDFs, emails and data stored in siloed systems make it difficult to assemble a credible history when a client or government department asks for it. When that data is instead generated as part of the job and is stored in a structured way, it becomes useful for operations and audits alike.

This is exactly what I see on farms that adopt a connected field workflow:

• Plans include label constraints, withholding intervals, and sensitive site contexts
• Applications capture real-time details such as rates, operators, conditions, and actual timing
• Reports can be extracted instantly for regulators, auditors, or processors

It's not about doing more work to 'tick the compliance box', but rather about 'doing less by doing it better'. It's about managing workflows so that compliance becomes a natural outcome of how you operate as a team.

Real farm lessons: compliance as operational value

Growers who have done this well tell the same story. A good example of this is Wysocki Family Farms in Wisconsin, where co-owner Nicola Carey recently told me: “You can have somebody completing work orders as they're leaving the field, so your information and history is almost instantaneous. By working this way, if we get a spot inspection from the USDA, I can turn everything around within six hours; it used to take us two or three days working off pen and paper.

This is achievable for every farming operation. The key, in my opinion, is to not see creating compliant field records as an extra step in the process that takes time, but instead create a workflow that integrates the creation of compliant field records into every activity that takes place on a farm.

Turn compliance into field intelligence

The farms that make things easy for themselves and achieve the best results aren't just the ones that comply with regulations, they are the ones that:

• Integrate compliance into everyday planning and execution
• Automate label checks and constraints so errors are caught early
• Connect recommendations to actual field actions with traceability
• Generate audit-ready reports instantly rather than retrospectively

Field intelligence isn't just about agronomy or yield. It's about confidence: knowing that your field decisions are both agronomically sound and compliant with regulatory and commercial requirements.

If you think about field records the right way, compliance shouldn't be a chore, but instead a competitive edge that is achieved at the same time as creating the kind of field intelligence that supports better decision making. Those farms that can streamline audit reporting, reduce risk, and optimize decisions will have a real operational advantage. That advantage starts with having one system where planning, execution, and reporting work together, not separately.

Compliance doesn't live in spreadsheets. It lives in context-aware field decisions. When we manage compliance that way, it goes from being a burden to being a strategic asset.