MCP server over the public catalogs of major US row-crop seed vendors — corn, soybeans, wheat. Sibling project to crop-chem-docs (pesticide labels), feeding the same Drawbar farm-advisor AI.

The server exposes per-variety records with agronomic ratings, disease tolerance, trait stack, maturity, and regional notes — so the advisor can answer questions like "which corn hybrid for sandy soil, drought-prone, RM ≤105 in northeast Iowa?" without rummaging through individual brand sites.

Vendor coverage

Vendor	Verdict	Varieties	Notes
Bayer seeds (DEKALB + Asgrow + WestBred)	🟢	~475	Same `cropscience.bayer.us` Next.js infra as crop-chem-docs
Golden Harvest (Syngenta)	🟢	~175	Sitemap + server-rendered HTML + Syngenta CDN PDFs
NK (Syngenta)	🟢	29	Shares PDF fetcher with Golden Harvest
AgriPro (Syngenta wheat)	🟢	24	Drupal Views, server-rendered
Beck's PFR	🟡	2,089	Public Sanity GROQ API (no auth)
Beck's products	🟡	860	Identity-only until SeedIQ XHR sniffed
Pioneer (Corteva)	🔴	—	ToS bans automation — curated fallback lesson instead

Quick start

git clone https://git.jpaul.io/justin/seed-mcp.git
cd seed-mcp
python -m venv venv && source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Run one scraper
python -m scrape.runner --source bayer_seeds --force

# Rebuild indexes
python -m rag.index --rebuild

# Local MCP server (stdio for Claude Desktop dev)
python -m docs_mcp.server --transport stdio

Tools exposed

Tool	Purpose
`search_docs`	Hybrid + rerank variety search with crop / RM / trait / region filters
`get_page`	Full variety record by `(source, source_key)`
`list_versions`	Discover crops, brands, traits, RM/MG ranges, wheat classes
`corpus_status`	Counts + freshness; useful for health probes
`crop_seed_api_lessons`	Curated agronomy lessons — Pioneer fallback, disease-scale normalization, regional placement heuristics

Build phases

This is a clone of docs-mcp-template. The 13 phases in PLAN.md apply:

Phase	Status
0 — scaffold	done
1 — first scraper (bayer_seeds)	next
2 — chunk + index	pending
3 — baseline MCP tools	template defaults
4-5 — Dockerfile + CI	done (placeholders filled)
6 — reranker	shares `llama-rerank` sidecar with crop-chem-docs
7 — eval harness	pending (curate ~25 queries)
8 — hybrid search	done (template)
9 — diff_versions, list_cluster	optional
11 — `crop_seed_api_lessons` curated layer	pending

See CLAUDE.md for the canonical sidecar schema and the disease-scale-normalization gotcha (Golden Harvest is reversed).

Infrastructure

Registry: git.jpaul.io/justin/seed-mcp:latest (Watchtower) / :corpus-YYYY.MM.DD (production pin)
Embedder: shared Ollama pool with crop-chem-docs (Gitea-host GPUs + Windows Ollama; CI never hits trashpanda's production Ollama)
Reranker: shared llama-rerank sidecar on trashpanda's Tesla P4 (one container, both MCPs use it)
PRODUCT_NAME: crop_seed (not seed_mcp — used in Chroma collection, BM25 db filename, and crop_seed_api_lessons tool)