Technical Updates
- Understanding compliance at your assessment
- Using the Red Tractor website
During your assessment, compliance is measured against the full suite of Red Tractor standards, which vary by sector.
Regardless of sector, the standards are classed as different categories, such as key or normal. Your assessor will explain these during the opening meeting of your assessment.
Key standards are those where non-conformances can be classified as either major or minor. A major non-conformance indicates a total disregard for the requirements of the standard, whereas a minor non-conformance means that not all elements of the standard can be demonstrated as compliant.
Other standards, which are not labelled as key, are assessed simply - either compliant or non-compliant - without further classification.
Explaining the Risk-Based approach:
In the pigs, poultry, and dairy sectors, Red Tractor has collaborated with our licensed Certification Bodies to implement a risk-based approach to assessment. This system considers the overall compliance of a farm or site by looking at the number and nature of non-conformances recorded during an assessment.
However, the non-conformance levels noted in your assessment report do not reflect this risk-based rating system. Instead, they indicate only whether a particular standard is classified as key within the scheme.
For further details about our risk-based rules, visit the Red Tractor website.
It is now a legal requirement for farmers to prove their identity to suppliers as part of tighter regulations designed to prevent AN fertiliser from falling into the hands of terrorists and other criminals.
Agricultural suppliers are legally obliged to confirm the identity of a customer and keep a record of their photo ID and statement that they are a professional user of fertiliser before AN fertiliser can be sold, regardless of any prior relationship between supplier and farmer.
This information must be updated every 18 months.
Members should ensure their ID details are up to date with their suppliers to avoid any delays in purchasing regulated fertilisers.
The Red Tractor Assurance website is an essential resource for members, providing easy access to all our standards and a wide range of support materials.
Whether you need a copy of the standards or an appendix or want to download one of our templates for managing farm records, everything is available in one convenient location.
Our standards for each scheme are easily accessible and can be viewed directly on your screen. You also have the option to download the standards document and print it at home for convenience. Simply navigate to the scheme you are interested in and choose the standards document to download and print at home.
To quickly find templates, appendices, or guidance related to a specific standard, simply scroll to the bottom of the relevant standard page and select the appropriate tab.
