Red Tractor's own standards are written in clause-numbering language built for assessors, not for a farmer standing in a shed with a syringe in one hand. Here is the same requirement translated into what you actually need to write down, and where.
Every Red Tractor medicine record needs five things: the reason for treatment, the product used, the dosage given, the date of administration, and the withdrawal period. That information does not have to live in one physical book. It can be spread across a combination of documents, as long as you can show how it all fits together to link a specific medicine to a specific animal or group.
Red Tractor's animal medicines standards set out five pieces of information that have to be captured for every treatment, whether that is one cow with mastitis or a whole shed of lambs getting a wormer. None of this is unfamiliar to anyone who has stood over a sick animal with a bottle of medicine in hand, it is the same information most farmers already carry in their heads. The requirement is that it gets written down somewhere an assessor can find it.
A lot of farmers picture a single medicine book, a ledger kept on a shelf in the dairy or the barn, with every treatment logged in one column after another. That picture is not wrong. Plenty of farms run exactly that way and it works fine. But it is not actually what the standard asks for.
Red Tractor's requirement is that the five fields above can be demonstrated, not that they live in one document. The information can be a combination of documents: a vet's invoice that lists product and dose, a treatment sheet pinned up in the shed, a diary entry, a spreadsheet, whatever combination reflects how your farm actually works day to day. What matters is that you, and an assessor, can pull those pieces together and correlate a particular medicine to a particular animal or group, so the food chain stays protected and the medicine use stays traceable. If a vet invoice tells you the product and the dose, and your own notebook tells you the date, the animal, and the reason, that is two documents doing the job of one, and it counts.
The test an assessor applies is not "is there one book" but "can this farm show me, quickly, what was given to which animal and when." A messy but complete combination of documents passes that test. A single tidy book with gaps in it does not.
Individually logging every animal in a flock for a routine vaccination would be a lot of writing for very little extra traceability, and Red Tractor recognises that. Medicines administered routinely to a group of animals, a flock vaccination being the obvious example, do not need a separate entry for every individual animal.
Instead, a list held in the veterinary health plan (VHP) that covers the group, and includes the necessary information (product, dose, date, reason, withdrawal period), is enough. The group becomes the unit of record rather than each animal inside it. This exception only applies to genuinely routine, group-level treatments such as vaccines. An animal pulled out of the group for treatment of a specific problem, a case of pneumonia or lameness for example, goes back to needing its own individual record with all five fields against that one animal.
This next part is narrow and specific, if you keep beef, dairy or sheep you can skip it.
Red Tractor pig standards require producers to use the electronic medicine book (e-MB) specifically to record collated antibiotic use across the herd. It is not required as a daily record of every medicine given to pigs, only the antibiotic data that feeds into national usage benchmarking. Some pig producers choose to use the e-MB as their full daily medicine record too, because it is convenient to keep everything in one place, but that is a choice rather than a Red Tractor requirement. If you are not a pig producer, none of this applies to you, and the fields covered earlier in this guide are what your assessor will actually be checking.
Two things sit either side of what is covered on this page. The first is how long you have to hold on to these records once they exist, covered fully in the 5-year retention rule, a fixed minimum that applies regardless of how you choose to keep your records. The second is what an assessor actually does when they turn up on the day, covered in our guide to what assessors check during a visit. This page is about what the record itself needs to contain. Those two guides cover what happens before and after.
Most of the gaps in a medicine book do not come from farmers not knowing the rules. They come from the treatment happening at six in the morning in the rain with both hands full, and the paperwork getting done from memory two days later, if at all. Our farm paperwork guides exist because that gap between doing the job and writing it down is where records go missing, not because farmers do not care.
FarmHQ is built around that reality rather than against it. A photo of a vet invoice or a product label drafts a medicine-book entry with the reason, product, dosage, date and withdrawal period already filled in from what is on the page, ready for you to check and confirm before it is booked. Joe drafts, you confirm, nothing is logged without your say-so, but the blank-page problem, the actual reason records go missing in the first place, is solved before it starts.
Every treatment record needs the reason for treatment, the product used, the dosage, the date of administration, and the withdrawal period. These five fields apply whichever documents you use to capture them.
No. The requirement is that you can demonstrate how the information is collated to correlate medicine use to specific animals or groups, not that it lives in one book. A combination of documents, such as vet invoices plus a treatment diary, is acceptable as long as the five required fields can be shown.
No, not for routine group treatments such as vaccines. A list in the veterinary health plan covering the group, with the required information, is enough. Individual animals pulled out for treatment of a specific problem still need their own record.
No. Red Tractor pig producers must use the electronic medicine book to record collated antibiotic use across the herd, but it is not required as a daily record of every medicine. Some choose to use it that way, but that is optional beyond the antibiotic requirement, and this rule applies to pig producers only.