What our organic progress indicator actually means
The percentage on a farmer’s home screen is a guidance number, not a certification score. Here is the difference, and why it matters.
Every COM farmer sees a percentage on their home screen labelled organic progress. It is one of the most useful things in the system and one of the easiest to misread, so it is worth being exact about what it is.
It is a COM guidance indicator. It is built from configurable measures — whether chemical inputs have been recorded, whether compost or manure is in use, how many organic practices have been verified by a Cluster Leader, how much training is complete, and how complete the farm records are. COM sets the weights, and can change them without a software release.
It is not a certification score. Certification is a separate process with its own pipeline: a request, a cluster review, an inspection by an assigned inspector, a decision by the certification team, and finally a certificate with a number and an expiry. A farmer at 80% progress is not 80% certified. They may not be in the certification pipeline at all.
We keep the two apart deliberately, and the interface says so wherever the number appears. Blurring them would let a good guidance number be mistaken for a claim about food, and that claim is exactly what a certificate exists to make.