Avoid the Audit stress, don't take risks and work with people who can help!

Health and Safety Service - Cross Compliance - Farm Assurance. All part of the service.

The Rural compliance service is here to help all farms and agricultural business alike with all their compliance needs. These include health and safety, cross compliance, and assurance scheme assistance. We appreciate the issues with understanding and keeping up to date with all the regulations and what you are required to do to stay compliant on all three fronts. Having been in agriculture my whole life, I understand that most of us would prefer not to have to deal with even more paperwork. Let us help you and take the hassle out of ensuring compliance is kept up together, leaving you to look after your business.

I have summarised below the main points for each service and how we can help.

Did you know that health and safety now forms a part of Red Tractor Farm Assurance audits? Without a policy in place, you will have a non-conformance and only a short period of time to correct this. As well as forming part of Farm Assurance, you are required by law to have written policies, and risk assessments if you have 5 or more people involved within the business. A good health and safety record will also help with staff retention. Everyone wants to feel safe within their job. Having policies and procedures in place will help reassure staff and other visitors coming onto site. And if there ever was an incident, it would be reassuring to know that everything is up together and in place in case there was an investigation, or these documents were required for insurance purposes.

We help collate all policies and paperwork including a health and safety policy, risk assessments, hazard maps for the farmyard and fields, handbooks for employees and contractors which show all the relevant information they will need.

We offer practical ongoing support to ensure that all tasks are undertaken as safely as possible, taking into account the practicalities of the task and the farm. I am both IOSH and NEBOSH qualified, in addition to having grown up and worked on farms my whole life, so I also have practical experience and knowledge enabling me to advise on the best safety practices.

Cross Compliance requires you to have all the necessary documentation, such as manure management plans, soil risk maps, livestock calculations, N loading calculations, and slurry storage calculations. We offer help putting these all together as well as collating field records of organic manure applications and fertiliser applications to show farms are
compliant with NMAX limits, whether your farm is within an NVZ or not. If you are a farming business claiming BPS, you are required to keep these records. If you were to be inspected, you could be at risk of a percentage deduction in your payment if you cannot provide evidence of these records.

Assurance schemes tend to create a lot of hassle and stress when they are due. Let us take the hassle out of the process for you by assisting with making sure you have everything you need for the audit.

As part of assisting with any assurance audits, we help with collating all documentation that would be required. This includes the health and safety and cross compliance documentation listed above. We also help put together emergency plans and contacts, employee training records, vermin control documentation, and environmental protection documents.

We can help by either keeping your documents for you as they come in throughout the year, for example feed and bedding invoices, meaning you don’t have to spend your time searching through many files and folders for the documents you need. We will give you a checklist of documents to send us through the year, then when your audit is due, we will collate them all together into an easy-to-use file.

Alternative we can assist you with a ‘pre audit’, making sure you have everything you need ready. With both options, we will also look round the farm to point out any potential non-conformances the auditor may find before the day of the audit.

Every farm and farming business is different. Our service is personalised and specific to your business. There is no ‘one size fits all’ to any of these compliance issues.

The Farm Consultancy Group Rural Compliance Service is competitively priced and billed, either on a monthly direct debit or a single set up fee plus ongoing support charged at an hourly rate. Clients can choose to take up either a single service, mixture of the services or combine all the services to suit their own needs. We are here to help you.