Where the chemical data comes from.
This selector is built on a single dataset: the APVMA's own weekly PubCRIS export. BecSpec's site-wide sourcing rules, origin labels and neutrality commitments are on the data policy page; this page covers what is specific to agricultural chemicals.
The source
An agricultural or veterinary chemical product cannot legally be supplied in Australia until the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority registers it. The Public Chemical Registration Information System, PubCRIS, is the public record of those registrations, and the APVMA publishes it in full as an open dataset. That makes it an unusually complete picture of what is legally available here — not one manufacturer's catalogue, and not a curated selection.
| Dataset | APVMA PUBCRIS dataset for registered Agricultural and Veterinary Chemical Products and Approved Actives |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority |
| Licence | Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia — permits commercial use and derivative works, requires attribution |
| Obtained | Direct download of the publisher's own ZIP resource from data.gov.au. No scraping, and no use of the PubCRIS search interface as a data source. |
| Products in use | 7,470 registered products |
| Registered uses in use | 164,432 distinct host and pest combinations |
| Source export dated | 5 August 2026 |
| Update cycle | Republished weekly by the APVMA |
The ZIP is committed to this project exactly as the APVMA distributes it, with its SHA-256 recorded, and the build reads the CSV members straight out of the archive. There is no unpacked intermediate copy that could be edited without anything noticing.
Which files are used
| File | What it supplies |
|---|---|
| product.csv | The registration itself: product name, registration holder, formulation type, product type, registration status. |
| prodcon.csv | Constituents per product with amount and unit. Rows typed A are the actives; everything else is excluded. |
| constit.csv | Constituent code to constituent name. |
| produse.csv | The registered use table — one row per approved product, host and pest combination. 2.2 million rows fall in scope. |
| host.csv, pest.csv | Code to description for the two halves of a registered use. |
| statereg.csv | Registration status per state and territory. |
Which files are deliberately ignored
| File | Why not |
|---|---|
| prodcom.csv | Label comment fragments. In the published export these are truncated mid-sentence — a withholding period arrives as “KS AFTER APPLICATION”. Unusable as label text, and actively dangerous to display as though it were label text. |
| protect.csv | Protected data study citations. Nothing to do with whether two products are equivalent. |
| prodpack.csv | Pack sizes. A genuine future addition, but pack size is a purchasing detail rather than a substitution one, and it is not used in any comparison here. |
| labelreg.csv, host_alias.csv, pest_alias.csv, formul_list.csv, prodtype_list.csv | Not needed by this selector. |
Where the data was corrected, and where it was not
Three normalisations are applied, all of them to remove differences in how a fact was typed rather than differences in the fact. Each is set out in full, with worked examples, on the how matching works page:
- Constituent names are uppercased and the “present as” phrasing folded, so one substance recorded under two codes is treated as one active.
- Strength amounts are rounded to six significant figures, because the export writes 49.8 as 49.799999 in some rows and 49.800000 in others.
- Exactly duplicated constituent rows are dropped — there are 39 in scope.
Nothing else is touched. Salts and esters are not collapsed onto their parent acid, units are not converted between mass and volume bases, and no chemical name is fuzzy-matched to another.
Two data anomalies you may see surfaced
A small number of registrations record one active constituent at more than one strength — UVASYS sulphur dioxide generators carry three sodium metabisulfite loadings, ProGibb LV Plus carries gibberellic acid at both 64 and 100 g/L. These cover a family of formulations rather than a single one. They are flagged on screen rather than averaged into a single number that would be true of no product on the shelf.
A handful of host and pest codes appear in the use table with no description row anywhere in the export. Those are shown as the raw code. Displaying a blank, or guessing at a description, would both be worse.
What the register does not carry
This matters more here than in any other BecSpec selector, because the missing fields are the ones that decide whether a substitution is safe. They are listed in full on the limitations page. In short: no rates, no withholding periods, no resistance groups, no label text, and no supplier, stockist or price.
Attribution
Contains data sourced from the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority PubCRIS database, licensed under CC BY 3.0 AU. BecSpec is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of the APVMA.