Nitya Venkataraman · Product Designer

Bayer Crop Science · 2018–20

Harvest Manager

European growers work under strict pesticide residue limits. Get the spray plan wrong and the harvest is unsellable in your own market. Harvest Manager is a pre-season planner that lets a grower design a spray plan against the residue standard of the market they intend to sell into.

20
Berry growers in validation testing
3
Major production countries covered
3
Design iterations, each tested with growers
Role
Product Designer
Company
Monsanto / Bayer Crop Science
Timeframe
2018–2020
Markets
Spain, Poland, Germany
Three-panel illustration of the grower's dilemma: a grower sets out with a spray plan and the supermarket in mind; is then overwhelmed by pests, weeds, sun and rain all demanding intervention; and ends up holding the harvested fruit unsure whether its residue levels will let it reach that market at all.
The whole problem in three panels. Plan for the market, fight whatever the season actually brings, then find out at harvest whether you can still sell into it.

The grower's dilemma

Crops sold into the European market face very strict pesticide residue standards. A grower has to manage pests, weeds and weather — all of which demand intervention — while still producing fruit and vegetables that come in under those residue limits. The two pressures work against each other directly.

Failing to hold the line is expensive. Growers who miss the standard can't find a market for their produce at all, and end up selling outside their own markets at a loss. The decision that causes it is made months earlier, in a spray plan, with no feedback until harvest.

Grower persona describing a berry farmer managing residue compliance across several fields and target markets.

What growers told us

"Market demands higher quality but doesn't pay for the fruit."

"Need a way to manage the residue levels on an increasingly strict govt. standard for produce."

"Don't plan every spray pre-season, it depends on what's wrong on the field."

That last one shaped the product more than anything else. A spray plan is not a document you write once — it's a decision you revise every time the field changes. Anything that assumed a fixed pre-season plan would be abandoned by March.

Research

Spain · Poland · Germany

We ran interviews across Spain, Poland and Germany — the primary target markets for the application — to understand growers' goals and challenges. From those interviews we built an affinity map to theme the challenges growers were facing and work out how best to address them. It also served to test the assumptions the business had handed us at the start.

Three findings set the direction:

  • Residues are a problem that growers recognise and actively manage.
  • Growers are uncertain about what their residue levels will actually be at harvest.
  • Zero residue is where growers expect the market to end up.
Affinity map grouping grower interview notes into themes around residue compliance, market access, agronomic advice and cost of crop wastage.
The affinity map from the interview set, themed and used to check the assumptions we'd been given by the business.

The platform we proposed would:

  • Comply with the residue standards of different regions
  • Provide targeted agronomic advice
  • Enable greater market access and flexibility in where produce can be sold
  • Minimise cost by reducing crop wastage caused by high residue levels

Three iterations

Design process

Iteration 1 — journey, flow and sketches

The first pass was about sequence, not screens: mapping the user journey and flow, then sketching against it. The open question was where in a grower's year the product sits — we were designing a pre-season tool for people who had just told us they don't plan everything pre-season.

  • Hand-drawn sketches of the crop plan creation flow, showing field selection and spray scheduling screens.
  • Hand-drawn sketches exploring the field mapping and target market selection steps.
  • Hand-drawn sketches of the spray plan detail and residue calculation screens.

Iteration 2 — wireframes, tested with growers

The second iteration turned the sketches into wireframes and put them in front of farmers and growers to verify that the flow made sense to the people who'd have to use it between field visits.

Wireframes for the second iteration, covering crop plan setup, field mapping, target market selection and spray entry.

Iteration 3 — the pre-season residue planner

The final design let growers:

  • Map their fields — drawing field boundaries directly onto satellite imagery
  • Select a target market from pre-defined options, or create a custom market with its own residue limits
  • Create custom spray plans against that market's standard, per crop and variety

Making target market an explicit, changeable input is the core move. It turns an invisible constraint — the residue standard of wherever you eventually sell — into something the grower sets at the start and designs the season around.

  • Crop plan screen showing crop and variety selection.
  • Field mapping screen with a drawn field boundary on satellite imagery.
  • Target market selection screen listing retailer and regional residue standards.
  • Custom market screen with adjustable residue limit controls.
  • Spray entry screen capturing product, application method, date and rate.
Final designs for the crop plan dashboard, showing saved crop plans with field outlines and spray batch summaries.
The complete mobile screen flow, from phone number and OTP login through creating a crop plan, selecting crop and variety, drawing the field on a satellite map, choosing a target market or building a custom one with residue limits, entering spray details, and reviewing saved crop plans.
The full flow. Login, crop and variety, field boundary on satellite imagery, target market or a custom one with its own residue limits, then spray details per batch.

Where it got to

The application was tested with 20 berry growers across three major production countries, validating the pre-season planner flow end to end.