Grower guides

What a vineyard spray diary needs to record

Every Australian grape grower has to keep spray records, and most wineries want to see them before they take your fruit. Here's what a spray diary needs to hold, and what the people reading it are checking for.

Why the diary matters

Agricultural chemical use in every Australian state comes with record-keeping obligations, and the requirements are close enough that one good diary covers them all. On top of the legal side, your winery's supply contract almost certainly requires a spray diary before intake, and buyers' food-safety auditors ask for the same thing. The diary is the document that proves the fruit is clean, so it gets read more often than any other record you keep.

What to record for each spray

Record it on the day, while the details are still certain:

• Date and time the application started and finished.
• Where — the blocks or rows sprayed, and the area treated.
• What was growing — the variety and its growth stage.
• The product — full trade name of everything in the tank, and the rate for each.
• What it was for — the target pest or disease.
• How much — water volume and total product used.
• The equipment used and who operated it.
• The weather at the time — temperature, wind speed and direction at a minimum. Delta-T and humidity strengthen the record.

Two more numbers hang off every product in the mix: its withholding period and its re-entry interval. They aren't extra things to write down so much as clocks the spray starts — more on both in the withholding guide.

What the reader checks

An auditor working through a spray diary lines up three things: that every product was used at label rates on a crop it's registered for, that no block was harvested inside a withholding period, and that the record was made at the time rather than reconstructed later. Gaps, round numbers everywhere and missing weather readings are what make a diary look reconstructed.

Keeping and producing records

State rules generally require spray records to be made promptly and kept for at least two to three years — check your state's requirement, and treat the product label as the legal source for anything it specifies. The practical test is simpler: when a winery or auditor asks for the diary, you should be able to hand over a complete season in minutes, not reconstruct it from a shed notebook.

Wine grapes and export withholding

For wine grapes there's a wrinkle worth knowing: the withholding period on the label is set for domestic use, and the Australian wine sector works to the AWRI's agrochemical recommendations (the "Dog Book"), which can specify longer restrictions on use before harvest for export wine. Many wineries hold growers to those recommendations, not just the label, so check what your winery expects before the season's spray program is set.