What ends – and what doesn't
According to the announcement on the provider's website, the entire platform is being shut down, not just a single plan. New registrations are already closed; until the shutdown, 365FarmNet remains usable. In the provider's words, backing up the data is the users' responsibility, and it asks that this be done in good time before the shutdown date.
The provider names switching to CLAAS connect as one path. According to its statements, the licence there is free for existing customers in the first year and renews automatically afterwards; it offers the data transfer free of charge, coordinated through the contact person at the dealer. Whether this path fits is for the farm to decide. The terms in detail are on the provider's website.
What doesn't end are the duties. A record that existed only in a switched-off program can't be produced at an inspection any more. The decisive question is therefore not which program you use in future, but whether the evidence from past years is held by you in readable form, independent of any program.
A word about ourselves: FarmManager is an independent offering and has no connection to 365FarmNet or CLAAS. The names appear here to report the announcement accurately.
What a farm must still be able to produce
Plant protection. Records of every application must be kept for several years; under the Plant Protection Act the period only begins with the year following the record. For professional users there is a question of form on top: the transitional rule under which they may still record on paper ends with the current year. After that, the record must be kept electronically and in machine-readable form – that is, as a data record that a program can read; a mere image such as a scanned sheet doesn't suffice. So anyone without a program at the turn of the year can't record even the first applications of the new year in the required form.
Fertilisation. Anyone covered by the record-keeping duty of the Fertilization Ordinance records the fertiliser requirement before fertilising, records every fertilising measure, and summarises the farm's nutrient use annually. These records must be kept for several years beyond the fertilising year and produced to the competent body on request; the ordinance itself states the period.
Conditionality. For the crop rotation standard, what matters is which main crops stood on a field in previous years – insofar as the standard applies to your farm. This cropping history isn't a separate record-keeping duty, but it's the basis on which compliance can be shown. When you switch field records, it's the first thing lost if it existed only in the old program.
Then there is everything that was merely filed in the program: supporting documents, inspection reports, soil analyses. They usually exist elsewhere already – but not always, and that should be settled before the shutdown, not after.
- Plant protection applications per field and harvest year
- Fertiliser requirement assessments, fertilising measures and the annual summary
- Cropping history with main crop and catch crop per field and year
- Field boundaries and field designations
- Stored supporting documents such as inspection reports, soil analyses and certificates of competence
Securing in a fixed order
The provider names PDF, CSV and ISOXML as formats in which much of the data can be exported, and recommends securing work operations and field maps per harvest year. A simple rule follows: for every year that still has to be retained, you produce a document you can read and – where offered – a table you can process further.
The readable document is the evidence. It has to open without the old program and show, at an inspection, what happened on which area and when. The table is the working material from which data can be carried into another program. Anyone who secures only tables has data – but possibly not evidence that looks like the records they kept.
ISOXML is an exchange format for machine terminals. For archiving the records, it replaces neither the readable document nor the table; if you use it, you secure it in addition.
Check every backup while the old program is still running. Open the files on another device, compare spot checks against the view in the program, and store the files in two separate places. An export that turns out to be incomplete only after the shutdown can't be repeated.
- List all harvest years for which a retention period is still running
- For each harvest year, secure the field maps or field records as PDF
- For each harvest year, secure the booked work operations as CSV
- Export the plant protection records separately, as far as the program offers them
- Download stored supporting documents and attachments individually
- Secure the field boundaries and have the geodata export of your own aid application ready
- Trial-open every file and store it in two separate places
Field boundaries: the official source is usually the better one
For the outlines of your fields there is a source that depends on no program: the aid application (Flächenantrag). The Länder's application portals let you download the geodata of your own application – usually as a shapefile, depending on the state also as GeoJSON, KML or GML. These outlines are the same ones the administration knows; they therefore match the official field block and the area for which you claim payments.
That's why, when switching, it pays to take the current application as the starting point and then adjust fields that are farmed differently, rather than carrying over boundaries drawn in the old program. The old boundaries still matter: as part of the evidence of which area an earlier application referred to.
A second source for the cropping history is your aid applications from previous years, if you kept them: for each field they state the declared use.
What can be carried over and what can't
The move falls into three parts. Field boundaries can be carried into almost any field record system because common file formats exist for them. Tables such as booked work operations can be carried over if the new program has a table import and the columns fit together – that is manual work, but doable. The history as a whole, meaning the link between area, product, measure and person, is as a rule lost in the switch and can be reconstructed only from the secured documents.
A pragmatic separation follows: past years stay in the archive as secured documents, and the new program starts with clean fields and the cropping history needed for crop rotation. Anyone who tries to recreate every old entry spends a lot of time on data that has to be produced as a document at an inspection anyway.