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How to: Read the Inspection List and Fix a Line, Build and Share the Pack. Each regime names its own inspector, its own record and its own number of years. A farm that spreads nitrogen, sprays, claims a payment and sells into Europe answers to four of them at once. The vault is the place where those four records sit side by side with their retention periods, so that one export answers whichever inspector arrives.

The Law, In Plain Words

There is no single law about a compliance vault. There is a retention period in each law, and they differ. Two things follow. The longest period wins on a farm that holds all four records, so nothing is let go before seven years. And the record for one regime is often the evidence for another: a nitrogen application is an NVZ record, a Farming Rules for Water record and the evidence for an SFI nutrient action at the same time.

Where It Applies

The same pattern of overlapping periods holds outside the UK. An EU grower keeps the nitrogen record its action programme sets under the Nitrates Directive, the three-year spray record under Article 67, and the evidence for its eco-scheme claim [2][12]. A US grower keeps the nutrient plan and records its state sets, the two-year Worker Protection Standard display, the two-year restricted use pesticide record and, where it sells into Europe, the EUDR dossier its buyer asks for [9][10][13]. In every case the retention period is set by the law, not by the software that holds the record.

What AgriHub360 Keeps

The vault is the one place every record in this group is kept and exported from: the nitrogen record, the spray log, the SFI actions with their evidence and the EUDR dossier. Each record shows the retention period the regime that applies to it sets, taken from the table above, so you can see when a record may be let go. Exports are the paid step. A farm on the free plan can still build the whole pack and see every page of it, watermarked, with one button that names the plan and the price for that farm. Nothing is left out of the preview; the real download is the same pages without the stamp, plus the machine-readable files. The compliance pack is one export for one inspection. You choose the year; the nation is the farm’s. The pack is a zip of documents, each in the layout the regime that reads it already uses, plus the machine-readable files beside them. Where a record has nothing in the period, the document says “nothing recorded”. The inspector sees a gap that was checked. The inspection-ready checklist is one list in three places: the Compliance tab, the meter on Today, and the pack’s cover. It grades the things an Environment Agency inspection asks for first, the nation stated, the boundaries on the map, a crop on every field, a soil analysis under five years old, the nitrogen records, the risk map, the siting checks passed and measured, the heaps moved in time, the sprays with MAPP numbers, the SFI evidence, the manure store and its capacity, and each item is a tap from where it is fixed. A paid pack can be sent to an inspector or an agronomist as a link with an expiry of up to 90 days. The link downloads the real pack and needs no account; nothing is stored for it, so there is nothing to leak.
Cartoon of a folder holding four record cards with retention clocks and one dashed empty slot, exporting to a single document.

Four records in one folder, each with its retention period, and an empty slot that says nothing recorded.

References

  1. legislation.gov.uk. The Nitrate Pollution Prevention Regulations 2015, SI 2015/668.
  2. legislation.gov.uk. Regulation (EC) No 1107/2009, Article 67, as retained in Great Britain.
  3. HSE. Guidance on the requirements of the Plant Protection Products (Sustainable Use) Regulations 2012.
  4. Defra and Rural Payments Agency, GOV.UK. SFI26: scheme rules and guidance.
  5. European Commission, Directorate-General for Environment. Regulation on deforestation-free products.
  6. legislation.gov.uk. The Water Resources (Control of Agricultural Pollution) (Wales) Regulations 2021, WSI 2021/77 (W. 20).
  7. legislation.gov.uk. The Action Programme for Nitrate Vulnerable Zones (Scotland) Regulations 2008, SSI 2008/298.
  8. legislation.gov.uk. The Nutrient Action Programme Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2019, SR 2019/81.
  9. Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. 40 CFR Part 170, Worker Protection Standard.
  10. Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. 7 CFR 110.3, Records, retention, and access to records.
  11. European Commission, Access2Markets. Delay until December 2026 and other developments in the implementation of the EUDR Regulation.
  12. European Commission, Directorate-General for Environment. Nitrates.
  13. Maryland Department of Agriculture. Agricultural Nutrient Management: information for farmers.