UK farm guarantees are under pressure to change as industry leaders champion technology as a way to cut red tape and ease the burden on farmers.
Assurance, agriculture and agribusiness executives speaking at this month’s Oxford Agriculture Conference said smarter use of data can reduce duplication, shorten audits and build trust across the supply chain.
The debate comes a year after the UK Agricultural Assurance Review, commissioned by AHDB and NFU, called for step changes in the way technology, data and collaboration are used.
Giving a farmer’s perspective, Oxfordshire dairy and beef farmer David Christensen said guarantees remained essential to the reliability of food in the UK, but their provision was exhausted.
“These systems are very important. They may not be widely popular among farmers, but in the UK we have such high trust in food that we need something to stand behind them to justify our standards and justify our claims.”
He said the real burden lies with the administration, not the agriculture itself. “The most tiring thing about farming today is not the farming, but the paperwork,” he says.
While welcoming recent moves to consolidate testing, Mr Christensen pointed to duplication between systems as a key complaint.
“Hats off to Tesco and Red Tractor for putting this together. There was so much overlap, it was crazy,” he said.
Map of Ag director Rob Burgess said the Farm Assurance Review was designed to look at the whole system and identify how it could work better for everyone involved.
“The aim of the review was to look at the whole farm assurance process, see how it is delivering value to various stakeholders such as farmers and consumers in the supply chain, and make effective recommendations on how it can be improved going forward,” he said.
Red Tractor said it is already acting on the findings by developing technology-enabled solutions to reduce duplication and reduce audit pressures across its schemes, which cover more than 40,000 farms.
Philippa Wilshere, director of standards and operations at Red Tractor, said the member portal upgrade was aimed at helping farmers manage their warranty requirements throughout the year.
“We are upgrading the Red Traactor Members Portal to make it easier and more efficient to stay on top of your paperwork,” she said.
He said the changes should also reduce the amount of time spent with inspectors on farms.
“By using the portal, assessors will spend less time reviewing documentation during farm visits, reducing visit times,” she said.
Mr Wiltshire said work with Tesco Sustainable Dairy Group had already reduced duplication in dairy farm audits.
“Previously, these farmers had additional audits and individual inspectors,” she said.
“By partnering with Tesco, we are now able to enable farmers to use our portal and upload the necessary records for their customers, all very securely.”
She emphasized the need for farmers to remain in control of their information. “The data is the farmer’s data, and farmers need to be in control of that data at all times,” she said.
Looking ahead, Christensen said the next step must be automation rather than repeated manual data entry.
“There is already a huge amount of data in systems such as BCMS, herd management software, robots and milk records that can be automatically collected,” he said.
He also called for stronger coordination between institutions. “It’s frustrating to have to evaluate animals on different scales for different organizations,” he says.
He added that assurance could have more value if the data was used for benchmarking as well as compliance.
“There’s a real opportunity to look at the data and benchmark and compare how you’re doing,” he said.
Phil Pearson, development director at APS Group, said robotics, precision breeding and automated data collection were already helping streamline audit and compliance in the fresh produce sector.
However, speakers agreed that technology alone cannot solve this challenge and that collaboration between farmers, certification bodies, retailers and policy makers is essential.
Mr Wiltshire said the industry needed to think beyond short-term solutions. “We have to think outside the box as an industry,” she said.
“Don’t just think about what’s going to change in the next 18 months. What do you want to be like in five or 10 years? This is continuous change.”
