The authorisation registry and the label on a plant protection product speak a language of their own: authorisation, active substance, authorised dose, pre-harvest interval, toxicity category, formulation type. This page explains each term in one sentence, then says what it means in the field and where you see it in the app. The explanations are informative: the product label and the official registry remain the text that counts.
01 · Authorisation: what it means for a product to be authorised
Authorisation is the official permission under which a plant protection product may be placed on the market and used in Romania — on named crops, against named pests, at named doses. A product that is not authorised may not legally be applied, however well known it is.
In practice authorisation is not granted to "the product" in general: it is granted for named uses. The same product can be authorised on apple and not on pear, and the dose can differ from one crop to the next. So the first question in the field is not "is it authorised?" but "is it authorised for what I want to do with it?".
In FitoNova every product carries a status badge, and search results are split into authorised and not authorised. How that status reaches the app, and how fresh it is, is set out on the page about the authorisation registry as the data source.
02 · Active substance: what actually does the work
The active substance is the chemical or biological component of the product that acts on the disease, the weed or the pest; the rest of the formulation carries it, stabilises it and makes it applicable. A product may contain one or several active substances, each at a declared amount.
It matters in the field for two reasons: rotating active substances is what keeps resistance in check, and two products with different trade names can share the same active substance — which means alternating them is not really alternating at all. When an active substance loses its approval, every product built on it follows.
The app searches by active substance as well as by trade name, and keeps separate substance sheets with the status, the manufacturer, the purity, the ISO name and the CAS number.
03 · Authorised dose: how much the registry allows
The authorised dose is the amount of product permitted for one particular use — usually per hectare, sometimes as a percentage of the spray solution or per tonne of seed. It is part of the authorisation, not a recommendation: exceeding it is a breach, and under-dosing feeds resistance.
In the registry the dose is written as text, not as a number: there are ranges ("1.5–2 l/ha"), percentages, sometimes the application method in the same sentence. FitoNova keeps the text whole, exactly as it comes, and does not round it.
The dose calculator converts the dose into the amount for your area or your tank, but only when the text can be read without doubt; otherwise it refuses to calculate rather than approximate. Exactly how it works is described on the page about what the app does, screen by screen.
04 · Pre-harvest interval: how many days from treatment to harvest
The pre-harvest interval is the minimum number of days that must pass between the last treatment and harvest, so that residues fall below the permitted limit. It is set for each product–crop pair and is read from the authorisation, not from habit.
It is the term that costs the most to get wrong: a crop taken too soon after a treatment can be rejected at analysis, however correctly the product was applied. Where the same product is used on two crops, the interval can differ for each.
In the app the interval appears as a label on every use, and in the journal it becomes a date: the entry tells you when harvest is safe, and on the morning of that day you get a local reminder. When the registry's text cannot be read as a number of days, nothing is scheduled — silence rather than an approximate date.
05 · Withdrawn and not authorised: what the difference is
Withdrawn means a product was authorised and no longer appears as authorised in the registry; not authorised is the wider word, covering any registry status that is not "authorised", withdrawal included. They are not synonyms, and the registry does not treat them alike.
A withdrawal usually comes with deadlines: one period for sale, another for using up existing stock. Those are read from the official act and from the label, not inferred from the app — the reason for withdrawal is shown word for word, as the registry writes it.
FitoNova calls the second group of results "Not authorised" precisely because statuses that are not withdrawals land there too. If a product you saved or logged moves out of authorised into another status, you are notified when the catalogue updates.
06 · Toxicity category: what it says and what it does not
The toxicity category is the official classification of a product by how hazardous it is, and it is what determines the conditions for storing, handling and recording the product. It appears both in the registry and on the label.
In the field the category decides who may buy and use the product, how it must be kept locked away, and what protective equipment is compulsory. It says nothing about efficacy, and it does not replace the hazard statements on the label, which remain the reference text.
In the app the toxicity category is shown on the product sheet and is one of the search filters.
07 · Formulation type: what WG, EC, SC and the rest mean
The formulation type is the physical form the active substance is supplied in, written as a two-letter international code — for example WG (water-dispersible granules), EC (emulsifiable concentrate), SC (suspension concentrate), SL (soluble concentrate), WP (wettable powder), FS (flowable seed-treatment suspension).
In practice the code tells you how the spray solution is prepared and how it behaves in the tank: what dissolves, what needs agitation, what needs pre-mixing. It says nothing about the strength of the product — two formulations of the same active substance can deliver the same amount of substance per hectare.
FitoNova shows the formulation type on the product sheet, exactly as the registry publishes it. It is not a search filter.
08 · Target pest: diseases, weeds and pests
The target pest is what the product is authorised to control: a disease, a weed or an animal pest, named in the registry, often with its scientific name as well. The pest category is the split into those three broad groups.
An authorisation always ties the pest to a crop: a product authorised against powdery mildew on grapevine is not, by that fact, authorised against powdery mildew on cucumber. The crop–pest pair is the registry's real unit.
That is why the app's search applies the crop filter and the pest filter to the same registered use: "tomato + diseases" means one use that names both, not a product that has them on separate rows.
09 · Crop: why the authorisation is tied to it
The crop is the plant the product's use was authorised for, named as the registry names it. It is not a detail of the authorisation but one of its coordinates: without a crop there is no dose and no pre-harvest interval.
The registry's names are the official ones and do not always follow everyday speech; some uses are written for a group of crops, others for a single species. When searching, start from the crop as the registry spells it, not from the local name.
In the app the crop is picked from a selector and stays as a label above the results, and in the journal it is a required field, because without it an entry cannot be checked.
10 · Authorisation holder: who answers for the product
The authorisation holder is the company the authorisation was issued to and which answers for the product on the market. It is not necessarily the manufacturer of the active substance, and it is not the distributor you buy from.
It matters when you are after the original label, the safety data sheet, or clarification about a use: the holder is the right address. A product can have several holders listed in the registry.
FitoNova shows the holders on the product sheet and lets you search by them. Treat the holder's country field as a hint: the registry sometimes carries a city where a country belongs, and the app does not silently correct its source.
11 · Authorisation certificate: the number on the sheet
The authorisation certificate is the document attesting that the product is authorised; its number and date are recorded in the registry and are the product's official reference. The expiry date says how long the authorisation runs.
The certificate number is what goes into its own column in the treatment register, and what is asked for at an inspection. It is not, however, a unique identifier: the public registry holds values of very different shapes, including strings that look like a date.
The app can search by certificate number, and when you log a treatment the number is copied into the journal automatically, as of the moment of recording.
12 · Treatment register: what goes in it and how long it is kept
The register of plant protection treatments is the record a grower is required to keep for every application: date, crop, plot, product, dose, area, pre-harvest interval, responsible person. It is produced at an inspection and kept for at least three years.
Kept on paper, it is where exactly the columns an inspector asks for go missing: the certificate number, the active substances, the authorised dose. All of them are written in the authorisation registry, and copying them across by hand is the step that goes wrong.
FitoNova's journal carries the official model's columns exactly, and the export comes out as PDF or Excel, ready to hand over. The app is not, and cannot be, "certified" by an authority: it gives you the required form and entries made at the time of the work.
13 · PESTEXPERT: the public registry the data comes from
PESTEXPERT is the platform through which the official record of plant protection products authorised in Romania is published: which product is authorised, on which crops, against which pests, at what dose, with what pre-harvest interval — and what has been withdrawn.
It is the public source the authorities consult too, and it is the text that prevails. Any app, list or table reproducing that data is a copy, with its own lag behind the original.
FitoNova reads the record published there periodically and sends it to the phone; it adds no products, corrects no doses and fills in no field the source left empty. Which fields are taken and which are not, and why, is set out on the page about the data taken from the official registry.