The Bestandsbuch and antibiotics reporting – who writes down what

An entry describes an application, not a purchase. It records which medicine was used on which animal or group of animals, for what reason, at what dose, over what period, and by whom. Only this link turns a quantity sitting in a cabinet into a traceable treatment.

The core of it is attribution. A medicine booked without a link to an animal or a clearly defined group can no longer be traced back to any treatment later – and therefore to no withdrawal period either. This is the point where it is decided whether the record holds up under inspection or is just paper.

With individually kept animals, attribution is a given. With group treatments, it becomes the real work, because the group has to be described in a way that later still shows which animals it covered. A pen or barn name alone only holds up for as long as the occupancy doesn't change.

When the vet dispenses or applies a medicine, an application-and-dispensing receipt is created. That receipt is their record. The Bestandsbuch is yours. Both describe the same treatment, but they are kept by different people and checked separately.

The usual mistake is therefore always the same one – the receipt gets filed and the keeper's own entry never gets made, because the information already exists somewhere. At an inspection, what's missing isn't the information: it's the record. And that is exactly what counts.

The other way round, the receipt is the bridge between both sides. Carrying its receipt number in your own entry lets a treatment be traced from either direction. That is not a formality – it's the shortest path through an inspection, and the only one that doesn't rely on anyone's memory.

In Germany, the quantity report doesn't attach to the farm as a whole – it attaches to the usage type: the combination of species and production purpose in which animals are kept. Only the declared usage type determines whether, and for what, a report is generated at all.

This declaration therefore comes before the quantity report. It isn't a minor form on the side – it's the key under which everything else gets booked. Without it, the later report has no frame of reference. If it's wrong, a correctly reported quantity ends up attached to the wrong stock.

In practice that means: if what the farm keeps changes, the declaration has to be updated to match. A stock that doesn't appear in the declaration doesn't show up in the evaluation either – which looks convenient at first, and is the most unpleasant outcome at inspection, because the treatments happened anyway.

And where there's nothing to declare in a reporting period, that's a statement too. For the German database, a report that never arrives can't be told apart from one that was simply forgotten – both have to be actively declared.

The therapy frequency isn't a grade handed down from outside. It is calculated from figures the farm reported itself: the number of animals treated, the duration of the treatments, and the average stock over the reporting period. Every one of these figures comes out of the farm's own Bestandsbuch.

Two things follow from that. First, the figure is only as reliable as the record underneath it – a carelessly kept group assignment shifts it without anything actually changing about antibiotic use. Second, it isn't a verdict on animal health; it's a ratio.

Comparing it against the value calculated across Germany as a whole therefore shows where a farm stands in the field – not whether it treated correctly. It's a reason to take a look at your own herd management, and it can trigger farm-level measures. What it is not: a ban on treatment.

Anyone who wants to understand the figure should therefore look not at it, but at what it's built from. The binding rules on which consequences attach to it, and from when, are in the sources linked below.