💡 Treatment compliance, PHI alerts & efficacy scoring

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Summary

Add first-class treatment compliance tracking to inspection logs: capture EPA registration numbers for varroa treatments, compute Pre-Harvest Interval (PHI) end dates, calculate efficacy scores from before/after mite counts, and export inspector-ready treatment records (CSV/PDF). Pair this with the existing confidence-first recommendation engine so that "what to treat" and "compliant proof you treated correctly" live in the same workflow.

Market Signal

• Regulatory pressure rising: The EPA's 2024 advisory on FIFRA applicability reinforces that mis-application of registered varroa products is a federal violation. More than half of US states require treatment records during apiary inspections, for organic certification, or for pollination contract compliance.
• Competitor differentiation: VarroaVault is the only major beekeeping app in 2026 marketing automatic efficacy scoring, resistance tracking, and PHI alerts as headline features — and it's actively winning the sideliner segment on that basis. Every other competitor (HiveTracks, BeePlus, Apiary Book, BeeKeepPal) treats treatments as plain log entries.
• Standards alignment: Honey Bee Health Coalition's 2026 Varroa Management Guide codifies monitoring frequency (monthly Apr–Oct) and thresholds (2% late summer/fall, 3% active season), giving us a defensible default model.

User Signal

• The PRD's Sideliner persona explicitly calls out "treatment compliance records" and "multi-yard scheduling" as core needs, but the current MVP scope (prd.md) does not yet include EPA registration capture, PHI computation, or exportable compliance artifacts.
• FR scope already covers structured logging and recommendation rationale, so the data model is 80% there — what's missing is the regulated metadata and the export surface.

Technical Opportunity

• The recommendation engine (apps/api/internal/service/) already produces explainable action + rationale + confidence outputs. Extending the inspection log domain (apps/api/internal/domain/) with EpaRegistrationNumber, TreatmentStartDate, TreatmentEndDate, PhiEndDate, and pairing it with mite-count delta calculation is a pure additive change.
• Export can ride on the existing GraphQL surface — add a treatmentComplianceReport(apiaryId, dateRange) query returning the structured payload, render to PDF in the mobile app or via a small Cloud Run function.
• PHI computation is deterministic from EPA label data — a small reference table (packages/domain-types/) per registered product avoids any ML.

Assessment

Dimension	Score	Rationale
Feasibility	high	Pure data model extension + deterministic logic + export. No new infra.
Impact	high	Unlocks the Sideliner segment and gives Newbie/Amateur a confidence anchor ("you're doing this legally").
Urgency	high	VarroaVault is actively claiming this ground in 2026; regulatory enforcement is intensifying.

Adversarial Review

Strongest objection: "Compliance is a sideliner concern — Newbies don't care, and Sideliners are a small slice of the market. We'd be building for the smallest segment first."

Rebuttal: Compliance is the only feature that converts a sideliner from a free user to a paying user immediately, because it eliminates manual paperwork that currently costs them hours. And the PHI computation is genuinely useful to every segment — a Newbie who treats with formic acid and harvests honey two weeks later is committing a food-safety violation they don't know about. Framing this as a safety guardrail (not a compliance feature) makes it valuable across all three personas while still being the wedge for sideliner conversion.

Suggested Next Step

Create a product brief covering: (1) the EPA product reference dataset and how it ships/updates, (2) the inspection log schema additions, (3) the export format(s) state inspectors actually accept, and (4) a UX spike on a "PHI countdown" inline alert that pairs with the existing harvest-readiness flow.

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Proposed by the BMAD Analyst (Mary) on 2026-04-07.
Workflow run

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Weekly Update

What Changed

New competitive intelligence reveals significant market movement in the varroa treatment tracking space:

• VarroaVault has emerged as a specialized competitor claiming "no other major beekeeping app in 2026 automatically calculates efficacy from paired pre and post counts." They ship automatic efficacy calculation, lot-number tracking, temperature-at-application logging, and a multi-apiary mite dashboard. They explicitly position this as "the most significant gap in the beekeeping software market."
• BroodMinder's 2026 roadmap lists Varroa counting as a major focus with ~100 BeeTV hardware units expected by mid-2026, plus soil moisture and solar irradiance measurements for pollination management.
• A related new proposal (Discussion 💡 Automated treatment efficacy scoring from paired mite counts #348) explores automated treatment efficacy scoring as a recommendation engine feedback loop — extending this idea's compliance focus into quantitative outcome measurement.

Updated Assessment

Dimension	Previous	Current	Delta
Feasibility	—	high	→ (first assessment)
Impact	—	high	→ (first assessment; validated by VarroaVault's market traction)
Urgency	—	med	→ (VarroaVault is niche/standalone, not a direct platform threat, but validates demand)

Recommendation

Advance — VarroaVault's market traction validates demand for rigorous treatment tracking. Broodly should incorporate treatment compliance AND efficacy scoring (see #348) as a unified capability in the recommendation engine. The combination of compliance tracking (this idea) + efficacy measurement (#348) + confidence-scored recommendations is a stronger value proposition than VarroaVault's standalone calculator. Consider the jurisdiction-aware treatment registry (FR12a/FR12b) as the compliance foundation that this idea builds upon.