Keeping the register and reporting are two different duties
The duty to keep a livestock register depends on one thing: that you keep the species. It doesn't depend on having database access, on farm size, or on whether you had anything to report at all during the year. The register is the record kept on the farm; the report is what goes out from it.
This separation is regularly overlooked, because both draw on the same figures. Anyone who considers the register done once they've reported stands empty-handed at an inspection – what's asked for is the register, and for a period, not for a single date.
The reverse holds too: a cleanly kept register doesn't generate a report. Both have to happen, and both at different points in time.
- The register on the farm, kept continuously and retained
- The report of every movement between two farms, with both farm numbers
- The census report on the annual reporting date, even without a single movement
- The identification of the animals themselves, which is what gives the reports a reference point at all
Why quantities are reported here, not animals
Pigs carry a farm number, not an individual animal number – the ear tag says where the animal came from, not who it is. Sheep and goats are individually identified, but they move as a flock. That's why what gets reported is a quantity with a date, direction, and the farm of origin or destination, instead of a list of animals.
That has an uncomfortable consequence in practice: a transposed digit doesn't stand out. A wrong individual animal number eventually runs into a check; a movement with the wrong headcount just sits there until the stock on the census date no longer adds up. That's why keeping the register on an ongoing basis isn't an end in itself – it's the one place where an error like that becomes visible early.
The census date is the duty you forget without a movement
Once a year, the stock has to be reported as of the census date – regardless of whether animals arrived or left during the year. That very independence is what makes it the most commonly missed report: anyone who hasn't sold or bought anything has no reason to even look at the database.
A farm that keeps the species owes the report regardless. It therefore pays to tie the reminder for the census date to keeping the species, not to movements – that way it still arrives in a year when nothing else happens.
Where discrepancies between the register and the database come from
Two farms report the same movement, and both reports have to match up. If the headcount differs, the database doesn't flag an error – it carries both figures, and the difference only shows up in the stock. That's the same mechanism as with cattle, just without an individual animal to pin it on.
The second source is timing. If a movement is reported late, the stock is temporarily wrong, and a census report that falls inside that window locks the discrepancy in for a year. Anyone who keeps both in their own register – their own record and the state from the database – sees the gap before it becomes official.
What applies without database access
A farm can keep the species without having set up access to the database, and it can have access without being authorised for that particular species. In both cases the duty to keep the register still stands, and in both cases nothing goes out from the register.
That's the most dangerous state, because it feels like order: the figures sit neatly maintained in the system, and yet the authority has seen none of it. A record only counts as proof once it's clear whether it merely sits with you, or was also reported.