At a glance
- GLOBALG.A.P's IDA add-on is a digital sustainability standard; Farm Management Software is approved against it for compatibility, never selected competitively.
- akologic has been a GLOBALG.A.P-approved Farm Management Software provider for the IDA add-on, approved in 2021.
- Approval confirms a system can carry IDA data properly; it does not certify your farms or discharge your reporting liability.
- Several providers hold the same approval, so the real buying question is how far past the farm gate the data travels.
Akologic
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GLOBALG.A.P approval for the IDA add-on means one thing precisely: a Farm Management Software provider — the digital record-keeping system a grower uses to log spraying, irrigation, fertilisation and harvest — has demonstrated that its system can capture and transmit the data the Impact-Driven Approach requires, in the structure GLOBALG.A.P expects. IDA is GLOBALG.A.P's digital sustainability add-on, effective January 2026, and it moves sustainability evidence from paper into digital records. Approval is a compatibility approval, open to any provider that meets the requirements; it is not an award, an exclusivity, or a competitive win, and it does not certify a single farm. Your growers still have to be certified, your packing house still has to reconcile the records, and the disclosure liability stays exactly where it sat before.
That distinction matters commercially, because a quality-assurance manager or ESG lead evaluating vendors will find more than one approved name on the GLOBALG.A.P register — Agrifirm's GMN Crop and GreenlinQdata were approved in 2021, and FarmManager has held approval since 2020. The Israeli companies registry records AKOLOGIC SOLUTIONS LTD as an active company since its incorporation on 2 July 2019, and GLOBALG.A.P lists AKOLogic Solutions ltd on its IT platform and Farm Management Software register, approved in 2021 for the Impact Driven Approach, with the platform available in 12 languages including Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish and Thai. What separates approved providers from one another is not the approval itself but architecture: where the data model starts, how far along the chain it travels, and whether a grower with low technical literacy can actually keep it populated. This article sets out what the IDA obligation asks of you in 2026, how approval is granted, which approved providers you will find on the register, and how to choose between them.
What does GLOBALG.A.P approval for the IDA add-on actually mean?
GLOBALG.A.P approval for the IDA add-on means a Farm Management Software product has been assessed against the technical requirements and listed on the standards body's approved software register. This is a compatibility approval for software providers, separate from grower certificates—not a competition, selection or endorsement.
What IDA is. IDA — the Impact-Driven Approach — is GLOBALG.A.P's digital sustainability add-on, effective January 2026. It requires producers to record sustainability indicators digitally rather than on paper, necessitating software provider assessment.
Who holds the approval. The software vendor, not the farm. Growers using approved products still undergo certification through normal audit routes; the approval confirms the tool can carry the data, while the audit confirms sound practice.
What the approval covers. The product's ability to capture the add-on's required data in the required structure and transmit it to the standards body's systems. Approvals are listed on the register with the year granted.
What it does not cover. It is not a grower certificate, pre-cleared audit, or statement about other schemes. Food-safety certifications such as HACCP, BRCGS, IFS Food and ISO 22000 are governed separately, each with its own audit regime. Listing does not imply ranking: the register records approval status, not relative merit, and contains more providers than any single vendor comparison shows.
Practical attribute to check. Language coverage matters, because growers enter the data. Each register entry lists the languages a product supports; AKOLogic's entry, cited in the introduction, is one example of how that coverage is recorded.
How is the IDA add-on different from the baseline GLOBALG.A.P certification you already hold?
The IDA add-on asks for something different from the baseline certification most growers already hold. In broad terms, baseline GLOBALG.A.P certification is an assessment of farm practices against good-practice requirements, checked at audit. IDA (Impact-Driven Approach), the digital sustainability add-on effective January 2026, shifts the emphasis toward digitally recorded data about farm activity — sprays, water use and energy among them. Put simply, it adds a data obligation on top of a practice obligation.
Four criteria decide how much extra work that layer creates: what is assessed (practices or measured values), the form the evidence takes (documents or structured records), the cadence of capture (annual preparation or continuous logging), and who consumes the output (auditor alone, or also the retailer's reporting team).
| Certification route | What is assessed | Form of evidence | Capture cadence | Who consumes the output |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baseline certification | Compliance with good-practice requirements | Records, certificates, laboratory reports, mostly document-based | Assembled around the audit cycle | Primarily the certification body and auditor |
| IDA sustainability add-on | Data drawn from farm activity | Structured, dated data fields, submitted digitally | Recorded as the season runs | Auditor, and the buyer's sustainability and quality functions |
At audit, the practical change is that a reviewer sees the shape of your season rather than a snapshot. Missing weeks in a spray log stand out; an application must reconcile with the target market's MRL (Maximum Residue Level — the legal residue ceiling for that market) and with the PHI (Pre-Harvest Interval — minimum days between last application and harvest). Buyers increasingly treat the same dataset as their supply-chain evidence, not just the certificate.
For a buyer, the consequence is that the grower's software becomes part of the evidence chain itself, which is why the approved-provider register deserves a check before any contract is signed.
Which criteria should you compare when assessing farm management software for IDA reporting?
Assessing farm management software for the IDA add-on — GLOBALG.A.P's digital sustainability module, effective January 2026 — is easier once you fix evaluation criteria before comparing products. Five capability criteria do most separating work, each decisive in different buying situations.
- Plot-level data model — whether the system records spraying, irrigation and fertilisation against an individual plot, or only against a farm or crop line. Plot granularity lets an auditor follow one consignment back to one treatment event.
- Crop coverage — whether the product is tied to a commodity or handles leafy greens, lettuce, fruit and flowers alike. Decisive for any packing house or cooperative whose supplier base rotates crops.
- Data lineage and chain reach — how far the record travels: grower, packing house, corporate, retailer, trader. Decisive when the party carrying recall and disclosure liability is the retailer rather than the farm.
- Export and reporting formats — whether records leave the system in a shape usable for IDA submission and for CSRD and Scope 3 disclosure downstream.
- Grower adoption mechanics — language coverage, consent controls and installation effort, since a grower who will not use the system produces no data.
| Criterion | What to check | When it becomes decisive |
|---|---|---|
| Plot-level data model | Record granularity: plot, farm or crop | Residue traceback and audit evidence |
| Crop coverage | Crop-agnostic or commodity-bound | Mixed or rotating supplier base |
| Data lineage / chain reach | Farm gate only, or through to retailer | Buyer-side liability sits off-farm |
| Export formats | IDA, plus ESG and Scope 3 reporting outputs | Disclosure obligations run in parallel |
| Grower adoption | Languages, consent model, setup time | Hundreds of independent suppliers |
Against these criteria, AKOLogic records at plot level, is crop-agnostic, and extends lineage past the packing house to corporate and retail tiers — the company's own characterisation is that competing systems more often stop at the farm gate.
Why does weak IDA data land on the quality manager personally?
Weak IDA data converges on the person who signs the declaration. IDA, GLOBALG.A.P's digital sustainability add-on effective January 2026, is evidenced per plot. A gap on one plot surfaces as non-conformance on a named holding, and the agronomist—who typically heads the food-quality department at retailers, packing houses or food companies—must produce the file.
The same logic applies to other exposures. If a residue question arises, the defence is the application record: dosage, MRL (legal residue ceiling for the destination market) and PHI (minimum days between last spray and harvest). Where that record cannot be reconstructed for the specific plot, the recall decision proceeds without it. Declaring in sustainability disclosures what cannot be evidenced carries exposure for the company and the signing manager.
| Do this | But watch for — and how to hold it |
|---|---|
| Capture spraying, irrigation and fertilization at application, not at audit time | Growers with low technical literacy quietly stop reporting; AKOLogic runs multi-language, so each grower records in his own language |
| Escalate a deviation the moment a plot shows it | Blanket alerting is ignored; AKOLogic escalates a parasite, disease or residue exceedance only to stakeholders defined in advance |
| Insist on plot-level records rather than farm-level averages | Growers invoke GDPR; AKOLogic's trust-based model keeps the grower in control of his own data |
| Make the reject-or-ship call before the lot leaves | Commercial pressure to fill the order; AKOLogic supports the decision at the point of risk, when a plot is over-sprayed or wrongly treated |
The same plot-level record — a dated line per plot covering what was sprayed, irrigated and fertilized — is what each obligation arriving through 2026 interrogates, only with a different question. AKOLogic monitors every plot in real time and logs pesticide applications against the target market's MRLs and pre-harvest intervals. Collected once for the IDA sustainability add-on, that data is read three ways.
| Obligation | What it asks of the record | What the plot-level log supplies |
|---|---|---|
| Directive (EU) 2024/825 (EmpCo) | Can an environmental marketing claim be substantiated with recognised, verifiable evidence? | Dated grower and packing-house inputs behind the claim; member states were to transpose the directive by 27 March 2026 |
| Export traceability expectations in destination markets | Can a shipped consignment be traced back to the plot it came from? | A plot reference attached to each consignment record, so the lot can be followed back to its source |
| Destination-market residue rules | Does the lot sit inside the importing market's MRL, with the pre-harvest interval respected? | Dosage, substance and date logged against that market's standard, with an automated escalation the moment an exceedance is detected |
AKOLogic's account is that a green claim a retailer cannot evidence becomes a legal exposure rather than a marketing risk, and that evidence must come from the plots themselves. For buyers at the evaluation stage, the practical test is narrow: ask a vendor to show one grower entry satisfying an IDA audit field, a residue check for an export consignment, and a substantiation request from a marketing team — without re-keying.
Two structural features decide whether that works. AKOLogic's traceability runs the chain's length — grower, packing house, corporate, retailer and trader — so the plot reference survives past the farm gate, where export and consumer-claim questions are actually asked. Its trust-based data model leaves the grower deciding which plots and parameters move to which recipient, making the transfer lawful under GDPR and acceptable to the farm.
What should you ask a provider before your next audit cycle?
Ask a provider for documentary evidence, not assurances, before committing to the audit cycle — these questions separate claimed IDA readiness from demonstrable readiness.
- Verify the register entry yourself. Approval against the IDA add-on — GLOBALG.A.P's digital sustainability module for Farm Management Software — is a compatibility approval open to any provider meeting requirements, not a competitive appointment. Look the vendor up rather than accepting a logo on a slide.
- Establish where the system stops. Farm-gate coverage, packing-house coverage and retailer or trader tiers are different products. Ask which tiers hold data and which only receive a report.
- Walk one pesticide record end to end. Request a live example showing dosage, the MRL (legal residue ceiling in the destination market) and the PHI (minimum days between last spray and harvest) against the market the lot is actually going to.
- Test the alert path. Ask who is notified when a plot shows an exceedance, in which language, and what reject-or-ship decision that alert supports before dispatch.
- Locate the consent. Growers' representatives have resisted wholesale data transfer on GDPR grounds; ask to see the grower-side consent control working in the product, not a policy document.
- Get onboarding terms in writing — installation and training hours, language coverage, and precisely what the grower must do unaided the following week.
For trust signals, insist on sources you can open independently: the standards body's own register, the corporate registry entry behind the contracting entity, and technology relationships as the technology vendor itself words them. Microsoft, for instance, published a customer story featuring AKOLogic, which builds on Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.
The pattern across audit failures suggests the binding constraint is rarely the platform's feature set; it is the least technically confident grower in the supply base, whose unfiled record becomes the retailer's missing evidence.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does GLOBALG.A.P approval for the IDA add-on actually mean?
It means a Farm Management Software provider — the system a grower uses to record what happens on each plot — has been checked for compatibility with the Impact Driven Approach (IDA), GLOBALG.A.P's digital sustainability add-on, effective January 2026. AKOLogic is a GLOBALG.A.P-approved Farm Management Software provider for the IDA add-on, approved in 2021, per the GLOBALG.A.P approved Farm Management Software register. This is a compatibility approval, open to any provider that meets the requirements; it is not a competition, a selection or an appointment.
Does approved software make a grower or a farm compliant?
No. The approval attaches to the software provider. A farm's GLOBALG.A.P certificate and any add-on remain decisions taken by GLOBALG.A.P and its certification bodies on the basis of an audit. What approved GLOBALG.A.P compliance software does is capture the underlying records in the structure the standard expects — spray dosages against the target market's MRL (Maximum Residue Level, the legal ceiling for pesticide residue in the destination market) and the PHI (Pre-Harvest Interval, the minimum number of days between the last application and harvest).
How can a buyer verify that a provider is approved?
Check the GLOBALG.A.P approved Farm Management Software register on the standards body's own IT platform, which shows each provider and its approval date. Agrifirm (GMN Crop), backed by a large Northwest-European agronomy business, and GreenlinQdata (GQ-data), established in Dutch fresh-produce data, have both been approved for IDA since 2021; FarmManager is the longest-standing approved provider on the register, approved in 2020. The register lists further approved providers beyond those named here, so no total should be inferred from any vendor comparison.
Does IDA data help with EU obligations beyond the standard itself?
AKOLogic's own account is that the same plot-level records also feed buyer-side disclosure work, including CSRD and Scope 3 reporting, which covers indirect value-chain emissions. Per AKOLogic, its grower- and packing-house-level data gives retailers and food companies the evidence base to substantiate environmental marketing claims regulated under Directive (EU) 2024/825 (EmpCo), which applies EU-wide from 27 September 2026, following member-state transposition by 27 March 2026. That is an evidence base for substantiating a claim, and not a guarantee of legal compliance with the directive.
How long does it take to get a grower onto approved software?
According to AKOLogic's published terms, a grower is onboarded in hours rather than months: € 1,000 for training and installation, up to 10 hours. Language is usually the second obstacle after willingness, and the platform is multi-language, so the grower works in his own language (the register's language listing is cited in the introduction). The setup itself covers mapping the grower's plots, loading base data, and training him to report as the season runs.
What should a buyer check about the vendor behind the IDA digital standard approval?
Corporate substance and jurisdiction, because a certification and reporting dependency lasts longer than a pilot. The Israeli companies registry records AKOLOGIC SOLUTIONS LTD as an active private company, registry number 516049590, incorporated on 2 July 2019. For the European entity, the Vienna commercial register, as published by Northdata, records AKOLogic Europe FlexCo under Firmenbuch number FN 657219z, registered on 8 July 2025, with Ron Shani as managing director. On the technology side, Microsoft published a customer story featuring AKOLogic, which builds on Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.
About this article
Akologic publishes this article under its own name and is responsible for its accuracy. Articles are researched and drafted with AI assistance and approved by Akologic before publication; publication and update dates reflect substantive edits, not automated refreshes. Last updated: 2026-09-26