Field records (Ackerschlagkartei): what belongs in them and what is mandatory

The name dates from the days of index cards: each field had a card on which the year's jobs were listed one below the other. The principle has stayed. Field records organise everything that happens on the land by field. If you want to know what stood on the field behind the farm two years ago, or when it was last limed, you look in one place.

That makes field records two things at once. They are a planning tool, for example for crop rotation or next year's fertilisation. And they are the place where the legally required plant protection and fertilisation records come into being. The same applies to grassland and special crops; only the German word Ackerschlagkartei, with its “Acker” (arable land), has stuck to arable farming.

It starts with the field itself: its name, size and location. In many Länder this includes the identifier of the field block, FLIK for short, in which the field lies in the aid application (Flächenantrag). With it, field records and application can later be laid side by side without guesswork.

After that comes what happens on the field during the year, in the order of the work. The more precisely each entry is tied to a field and a day, the easier it is to produce as evidence later. An operation that only exists in the tractor's terminal is missing from the field records.

Plant protection. The EU regulation on plant protection products requires professional users to keep records of the products they use: which product, when, in what quantity, on which area and in which crop. The records must be kept for several years and made available to the competent authority on request; under the Plant Protection Act the period only begins with the year following the record. The farm manager summarises the records for the farm's areas and states for each application who carried it out.

An EU implementing regulation sets out the content in more detail and requires every application to be recorded without delay and kept electronically in machine-readable form. This includes, among other things, the authorisation number, the date and, where it matters, the time of the start, the treated area and, where available, the reference to the field from the aid application. In Germany, the Plant Protection Act still allows professional users to keep records on paper for a transitional period; the linked section states until when. After that the record must be a data record that a program can read.

Fertilisation. The Fertilization Ordinance requires two records. Before significant quantities of nutrients are applied, the fertiliser requirement has to be determined and recorded. After each fertilising measure, within a short period, you record on which field which material was applied, in what quantity and with how much nitrogen and phosphate. Both are summarised once a year for the farm. The ordinance exempts some farms and areas, such as very small farms; deadlines, exemptions and retention period are in the linked section.

Conditionality and aid application. Anyone who receives direct payments must comply with the crop rotation standard on arable land unless an exemption applies. What counts is which main crops stood on an area in previous years. That is not a separate record-keeping duty. But the cropping sequence per field is exactly what field records hold anyway, and with them compliance can be shown. More on this in the article on conditionality and landscape features.

Paper field records work as long as they are complete and can be found. For plant protection this option ends with the transitional rule, and anyone still working on paper then has to record every application electronically as well.

A spreadsheet in Excel costs nothing but time and can be laid out freely. It is a data record that a program can read. Whether your own template contains all the required details shows when you compare it with the annex of the implementing regulation. What a spreadsheet does not do is connect things: it does not check whether a product is authorised for the crop, whether the fertilisation matches the determined requirement, or whether the same crop stands too often in a row on one field. That checking stays manual work.

Digital field records attach area, crop, product and person to one operation and can point out errors as you enter. In return they cost money, need setting up, and the data sits with a provider. So make sure you can export the records completely at any time. What happens when a program is discontinued is described in the article on switching from 365FarmNet.

Start with the areas, using the geodata export of your own aid application. The Länder's application programs offer it, usually as a shapefile. The outlines and identifiers in it are the same ones the administration knows, and you do not have to redraw any boundaries.

Then enter the crops of the current year and, as far as needed for crop rotation, the main crops of previous years. The aid applications of previous years state the declared use for each field. You do not have to re-enter older plant protection and fertilisation records. They stay in the archive as documents until their retention period has expired; where a clean spreadsheet exists, it can also be carried over.