The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) has published its response to the Farm Assurance Review (FAR), and said while some recommendations were widely applicable, others focused specifically on Red Tractor.

AHDB stated that it is “committed to working quickly on key recommendations”. Most of the recommendations will require collaborative working and hence some time. It highlighted that prioritisation is “vital” if real change on the most important issues is to be delivered quickly, rather than seeking to deliver immediate change on all the recommendations.

The key areas highlighted in the report that AHDB plans to prioritise are:

• The role and purpose of assurance – Collaborating to ensure industry alignment on the role and purpose, including benefits, of particular schemes. This is vital if there is to be ongoing support for assurance from farmers.
• Red Tractor ownership – AHDB agrees the owners of Red Tractor should show greater and more active leadership, to help shape its future direction and organisational culture. AHDB is committed to working with the fellow owners to ensure delivery.
• Data – AHDB is supportive of the general direction of this recommendation as data is a major area of opportunity for the industry. However, for it to work effectively and to “collect it once, use many times”, solutions must be found to the control/ownership of data, creating trust, not undermining the value of data, resolving governance standards and putting in place technical standards to “make things easy for farmers”.
• Environmental standards – AHDB will aim to use its ongoing work on baselining and evidence to support the development and acceptance of wider standards (outside of farm assurance), with the clear objective that levy payers must have the potential to benefit from future standards. Whether environmental standards should be included in farm assurance or not will depend on incentives for levy payers and the role and purpose of particular assurance schemes.

Commenting on the Farm Assurance Review, AHDB CEO Graham Wilkinson said: “AHDB is fully committed to seeing change in assurance that benefits everyone. My team and I are continuing to work with the unions, having jointly funded the original report, in supporting David Llewelyn, the lead independent commissioner, who will report on progress in the future.

“In addition to the key cross sector areas, we will also focus on undertaking the work to compare and contrast the schemes and wider international standards for Cereals and Oilseeds. This work will help to inform the wider discussion between all parties in the supply chain about how assurance in this sector should work.

“The report is applicable to all assurance schemes, but it is clear that some of the recommendations are focused specifically on Red Tractor.”

AHDB chair Nicholas Saphir said: “As one of the six owners of Red Tractor, AHDB is committed to working to see genuine change that leads to the majority of members and stakeholders supporting the scheme. The AHDB board will review progress by Red Tractor in the autumn.

“We recognise that some may never support the concept of assurance, but the vast majority of all parts of the supply chain will benefit from strong assurance schemes that have clear objectives, deliver value and work effectively.”