Nobody keeps a national register of hours lost to livestock admin, but the surveys that do exist point in the same uncomfortable direction, and every regulatory change landing in the next two years adds to the pile rather than clearing it.
No single verified UK-wide figure for hours per farm exists, but the documented signals agree: a 2023 industry survey found some farmers spending more than 15 hours a week in the office on paperwork, with 86% of 242 farmers surveyed reporting an increase in admin, dairy hardest hit. Separate parliamentary evidence on farmer mental health found 62% of farmers reported problems with paperwork itself and 56% struggled to understand the forms, with paperwork identified as farming's most common source of stress.
The most cited figure comes from a 2023 survey by Sum-IT, a farm management software provider, reported by Farmers Weekly. It found that paperwork linked to farm assurance schemes, regulatory bodies and supply contracts was keeping some farmers in the office for more than 15 hours a week. Of the 242 British farmers surveyed, 86% reported an increase in farm administration over the previous three years, with dairy farmers hit hardest, partly driven by the expectations of milk buyers layered on top of statutory requirements. It is worth naming the source plainly: Sum-IT sells farm software, so the survey sits alongside a commercial interest, but the topline numbers have been independently reported and match the direction of every other piece of evidence on this subject.
A separate strand of evidence looks at the problem from a different angle entirely, not how long paperwork takes, but how usable it actually is. Written evidence submitted to a UK parliamentary committee examining mental health risks to farmers found that 62% of farmers reported problems with paperwork, and 56% had difficulties understanding the forms themselves. Across multiple studies cited in that evidence, paperwork was consistently identified as the single most common cause of stress in farming, ahead of weather, market prices, or workload in the field. That is a genuinely different failure mode from a time-cost problem: it is not only that the forms take too long, it is that a meaningful share of farmers find them hard to actually follow in the first place, which is precisely the gap plain-English guidance is meant to close.
Three separate regulatory shifts landing over the next two years each add to this pile rather than shrink it. The phase-out of the Basic Payment Scheme, ending completely by 2027, pushes farmers toward Environmental Land Management schemes that are evidence-heavy by design, covered in where ELM actually stands. The move off BCMS toward the Livestock Information Service, alongside mandatory electronic ID from January 2027, changes how identification and movement data gets captured, detailed in the EID mandate explainer. And England's new bovine TB strategy recommends more frequent testing for herds in the Edge Area and mandatory post-movement testing for cattle entering lower-risk areas, each generating its own test record, covered in the TB strategy explainer. None of these changes were designed with farm office time as the primary consideration, and none of them make the paperwork pile smaller.
If you want a rough read on your own farm's admin load without waiting for a national survey, time yourself for one representative week, medicine book, movement reporting, invoicing, VAT records, all of it. Most farmers underestimate their own total until they actually add it up, because the time is spread across small five and ten minute tasks rather than one obvious block.
Assurance scheme compliance was named by 63% of dairy farmers as the largest single share of their office work, ahead of regulatory compliance tasks specifically tied to HMRC and BCMS. What rarely gets measured directly, but shows up constantly in how farmers describe their own week, is the time lost joining information across systems that were never built to talk to each other: cross-referencing a vet invoice against the medicine book by hand, re-entering the same animal identifiers into a compliance system and then a bookkeeping spreadsheet, checking a Red Tractor record against a separate VAT record for the same purchase. None of those individual steps takes long. Doing them dozens of times a week, across systems that share no data, is exactly where the hours quietly disappear.
It also matters who is actually doing this work. On a lot of farms the paperwork falls to a spouse or a part-time farm secretary rather than the person out with the stock, someone managing several separate logins and paper trails on behalf of a business they may only see the field-side of occasionally. Time spent reconciling one system against another is time that specific person is not spending on the parts of the job that are actually rewarding, and it is a significant part of why "farm admin" gets described as draining in a way that field work, for all its physical demands, more often is not.
FarmHQ exists specifically for that cross-referencing gap: a vet receipt photo becomes both a medicine-book entry and a VAT-coded expense line in one action, rather than two separate ones in two separate systems that never talk to each other.
See how FarmHQ worksA 2023 industry survey by farm software provider Sum-IT, covered by Farmers Weekly, found paperwork linked to assurance schemes, regulators and supply contracts keeping some farmers in the office more than 15 hours a week, with 86% of 242 farmers surveyed reporting an increase in admin, dairy farmers hit hardest.
Both. Separate written evidence to a UK parliamentary committee on farmer mental health found 62% of farmers reported problems with paperwork and 56% had difficulties understanding the forms themselves, with paperwork identified as the most common cause of stress across multiple studies.
Three converging pressures: the phase-out of the Basic Payment Scheme pushing farmers toward evidence-heavy stewardship schemes, the move from BCMS to the Livestock Information Service alongside mandatory EID from 2027, and stricter bovine TB testing recommendations adding more test records to keep.
Assurance scheme compliance was named by 63% of dairy farmers as the largest single share of their office work, ahead of regulatory compliance tasks such as HMRC returns and BCMS reporting.