Group Certification (Option 2)

Built for the certificate holder, not for a single farm

The documentation burden sits with the holder. So does the audit date.

One contract covers every member farm

Under the GLOBALG.A.P. General Regulations, Rules for Producer Groups (v6.0), a group certificate may be held by an organisation entitled to agricultural production and/or trading (4.1.1 b) — a packhouse, an exporter or a cooperative, not only a farm. That structure moves the paperwork to the holder: the member registry, the annual internal audit at each member site, and the evidence behind both. Hortusys gives the holder one system for all of it, while each member farm keeps working in its own isolated tenant.

Member registry
Internal audits
Spray records
Labour evidence
  • Member registry with area and quantity per product and the date of each member's last internal audit (4.1.2.2 a)
  • Each member farm works in its own isolated tenant — the holder sees the group, the farm sees only itself
  • Spray application records assembled across all members without collecting notebooks
  • GRASP evidence produced from the same records that run payroll, not reconstructed before the audit
  • An audit trail per member site instead of a shelf of folders per season
  • Adding the twenty-first member costs the holder roughly what the twentieth did

How a group runs on Hortusys

1

Register the group

Load the member list — area, crops and expected quantity per product. The registry becomes the single reference for the certificate scope.

2

Members record in the field

Each farm records harvest, treatments and working time in its own tenant, on Android, offline where there is no signal.

3

The holder assembles

Internal audit checklists, spray records and labour evidence are pulled per member and per season, without asking anyone to scan anything.

4

The audit becomes a query

When the certification body asks for a member's records, the answer is a filter — not a search through storage.

Group certification questions

Can an exporter or packhouse hold the certificate instead of a farm?

Yes. Rules for Producer Groups 4.1.1(b) requires the applicant to be entitled to agricultural production and/or trading, which covers a trader, an exporter or a packhouse. That is the structure Hortusys is built around — the holder carries the documentation, the members carry the fields.

Does every member farm need its own licence?

No. Members work inside the group's system, each in an isolated tenant, so one farm cannot see another farm's data. The holder holds the contract.

Is a paper record still acceptable?

Yes, and we will not tell you otherwise. Article 67 of Regulation (EC) No 1107/2009 and Ukrainian law 86/95-VR are neutral about format — a notebook complies. The problem is not one farm's notebook. It is assembling twenty of them, every season, ahead of an audit at every site.

What actually changes for the holder?

The work that scales with member count — the registry, the internal audits, the evidence — stops being manual collection and becomes a query. That is the only part of group certification that gets worse as the group grows.

Carrying the paperwork for other people's farms?

See how a group certificate holder runs the registry, the internal audits and the evidence from one place.

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