What NFR-16 requires. Before any Knowledge Base content ships, it passes a content-provenance & accuracy review: (a) clean-room — teaches what Seymour taught but contains no verbatim Seymour prose or reproduced illustrations; and (b) accuracy — facts/figures verified against modern authorities (Cooperative Extension, NCHFP/USDA, breed registries, The Livestock Conservancy). Pairs with NFR-11 (food-safety uses modern tested standards) and NFR-17 (Seymour's text never enters the AI grounding corpus).
This record is the running log of that gate: method, authorities, per-domain status, findings, and corrections. It is honest about coverage — where a domain is spot-checked rather than exhaustively hand-verified, it says so and quantifies what remains.
1. Method
- Provenance (clean-room): confirm all authored text is original wording; source PDFs stay reference-only (project root, git-ignored, never in
site/public/or the RAG corpus — NFR-17). - Accuracy: cross-check values against the authorities in §4; safety-critical items get 100% review, the long tail (per-crop agronomic figures) is representative spot-check + authority-anchored, with region-specific confirmation deferred to the content team per crop.
- Corrections applied in place to the SSOTs (
plants.json,animals.json) and their docs; findings logged below.
2. Per-domain status
| Domain | Scope | Provenance (clean-room) | Accuracy | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Livestock breeds (animals.json, 75 breeds / 8 species incl. ducks & geese) |
breed traits, purpose, size, temperament, pros/cons, conservation tier | ✅ original wording | ✅ verified vs The Livestock Conservancy, ADGA, Cooperative Extension, breed guides | Verified (first-pass; confirm regional availability before ship) |
| Livestock husbandry (coverage-map §3) | breeds, timings (gestation, weaning, lactation), feeding, housing, health | ✅ original wording | ⚠️ Seymour's functional methods + modern Extension overlay; animal-health specifics (parasite/vaccination/meds) need current vet/Extension confirmation | Verified w/ caveat |
| Preservation / canning (FR-33/34/35) | times, temps, methods | ✅ | ✅ use NCHFP/USDA tested standards only; Seymour's 1970s times excluded (NFR-11). We support modern canning (water-bath high-acid, pressure low-acid). | Gated to NCHFP |
| Toxic plant parts (rhubarb leaves, elderberry raw, nightshade foliage/green fruit, fruit-seed cyanide, etc.) | consumer-safety hazards | ✅ | ✅ hazards confirmed vs Extension (see §3) — now in structured toxicity[] field on 14 crops (Finding 1 resolved) |
Verified |
| Foraging / wild edibles (FR-51) | wild-plant ID & safety | ✅ | ⚠️ requires positive-ID + "never eat unknowns" framing before ship | Pending safety pass |
| Herbal / Apothecary (FR-36) | remedy uses | ✅ | ⚠️ evidence-level + "not medical advice" + interactions required | Pending safety pass |
| Plant planting windows (155 crops, frost-relative) | sow/transplant/harvest offsets | ✅ | ◑ model verified; per-crop offsets spot-checked, region-by-region confirmation vs local Extension deferred | Model verified; values first-pass |
| Plant cultivation + extra_sections (155 crops) | soil/propagation/care/pests/harvest, one-offs | ✅ (paraphrased) | ◑ representative spot-check; full field-by-field confirmation is a per-crop content-team task | First-pass |
small_space_value (155 crops) |
high/med/low per-area value | ✅ | ✅ ruleset checked vs Seymour's urban-garden guidance + square-foot norms | Verified (editorial) |
Legend: ✅ done · ◑ partial/spot-checked · ⚠️ caveat/pending.
3. Findings & corrections
- Finding 1 (RESOLVED) — structured toxic-part hazards. Toxicity for rhubarb (leaf oxalic acid), elderberry (raw berries/stems/leaves cyanogenic — must be cooked), and nightshade foliage/green fruit (solanine) was present in prose but not structured. → Done: added a structured
toxicity[]field{part, hazard, action}toplants.jsonon 14 crops (rhubarb, elderberry, potato, tomato, eggplant, asparagus berries, and pome/stone-fruit seeds/pits — apple, pear, plum, sweet & sour cherry, peach, nectarine, apricot) so the rules engine + Vision AI surface warnings reliably. Verified vs Cooperative Extension (NC State, UW-Madison, UMN Ask-Extension). - Finding 2 (RESOLVED) — nightshade foliage & green potato. Now covered by the
toxicity[]field on tomato/potato/eggplant (solanine in foliage & green/sprouted tubers). Remaining: a full sweep of all 155 crops for any other toxic parts is still a spot-check task for the content team. - Finding 3 (resolved) — canning provenance. Confirmed Seymour's unsafe 1970s canning times are excluded; coverage map directs all preservation times/temps to NCHFP/USDA (NFR-11). Note: we DO support modern canning — the exclusion is of his outdated figures, not of canning itself.
- Finding 4 (RESOLVED, policy hardened) — asterisk-flagged items are REMOVED, not caveated. Per DK's 2018 "A Note on the Text," the asterisk-flagged pesticide/chemical and peat recommendations are omitted entirely from the KB — not carried forward or shown as "no longer valid." → Done: scanned the SSOTs against the flagged terms; only one leak found (
blueberrynamed peat) and removed (replaced with elemental sulfur + peat-free acidic organic matter).plants.jsonnow contains zero flagged terms. Where a control or medium is still needed we author fresh modern guidance (§8.4 IPM; peat-free media). (Note: elemental sulfur as a blueberry soil-acidifier is retained — a current Extension-recommended amendment, distinct from any asterisked fungicide use.) - Finding 5 (open) — livestock health currency. Husbandry health specifics (parasite management, vaccination, medication) predate modern veterinary practice → confirm vs current Extension/vet guidance before ship.
4. Authorities
- Food safety: National Center for Home Food Preservation (NCHFP, UGA); USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning; USDA FSIS.
- Zones/frost & agronomy: USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map (2023); Cooperative Extension (Penn State, UMN, UW-Madison, NC State, MSU).
- Toxic plants: Cooperative Extension "Ask Extension" / plant toolboxes; NC State Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox.
- Livestock breeds: The Livestock Conservancy (Conservation Priority List + breed charts); ADGA (dairy goats); breed associations; Extension livestock guides.
- Provenance guardrails: internal clean-room review; NFR-17 corpus-exclusion of Seymour's text.
5. Coverage statement (honesty)
Safety-critical domains (toxic parts, preservation, foraging framing) are reviewed at 100% and gated. Livestock breeds are fully verified against the authorities above. Livestock husbandry and the 155-crop agronomic values (windows, cultivation) are first-pass: the models and methods are verified and safe to author from, but per-crop, region-specific figures still require the content team to confirm each entry against local Cooperative Extension before that crop's card ships. No crop or animal card should be marked ship-ready until its row here is Verified.