Flindt on Friday: Pointers on filling pointless farm forms

“Have you filled in that pointless form yet?” asked Hazel, as I got up from the kitchen table and headed for the office.

I thanked her for the reminder (thank goodness one of us can remember things) and promised her that I had; we could now have a little bonfire after tidying up a fallen tree without the black helicopters swooping in.

(Waste Exemption D7, waste codes 020103, 020107, 200201, 030105 and 030301, of course.)

See also: Rule reminder: Key pesticide stewardship guidelines

About the author

Charlie Flindt

Charlie Flindt is a tenant of the National Trust, farming 380ha in Hampshire with his wife, Hazel. He’s a weekly columnist writing for Farmers Weekly and never fails to raise a few eyebrows and tickle a few funny bones with his hilarious musings about the farming world.

Read more articles by Charlie Flindt

“No,” she said. “The other pointless form. The one that was so pointless it had to be supplemented with a Meaningless Company Platitude.”

Hold on – she was right. There was another one, and it did come wrapped in a groan-inducing banality.

Mandatory madness

I can remember a bit of fuss when rumours of a new compulsory form hit the press – not least because there seemed to be no official notification of it. If we weren’t avid readers of the farming papers, we might not have heard of it.

It smacked of those iffy internet messages – “Send your email address to this website and BA will give you two free tickets to the Bahamas!” – that managed to harvest personal info from otherwise quite sensible people. 

And the platitude – I could remember reading it and thinking, “Surely no government department would stoop to that sort of nonsense, or pay some wonk with red braces and matching glasses to come up with it.”

Now, what was it? As I rummaged through the paperwork on the desk, I tried to remember. “Extra Forms Mean Happy Bureaucrats”? “Build Back Better Using Paperwork”?

Aha! There it was: “Smarter Rules for Safer Food”!

There were the details of the form, too: The Official Controls (Plant Protection Products) Regulations 2020 (the 2020 Regulations). Snappy. 

Hazel was quite right to give me a post-breakfast prod; in true Time Team style, I had only three days to do it.

And I was right, too; the news was brought to us via an agrochemical company’s newsletter, not by anything official.

Forget late fungicides, forget cutting the hay – a compulsory form takes precedence. I tracked it down on the internet and downloaded the form.

It was in Excel format, and wasn’t the most polished bit of formatting. I’m no computer geek, but neither am I a techno-innocent, and even I could tell it was a bit of a mess.

Function over form

For all its importance and amateurishness, it was a remarkably simple form. Who am I and where am I? Easy.

And how much plant protection product will I be using? Ah; not so easy. How long is a bit of string?

I went looking for weather forecasts for the next 12 months – the best guide to how much fungicide and insecticide I’ll be using – but found none.

I found plenty for the next three days, which will be wrong, and for 100 years’ time, which will, of course, be spot-on, but none for the next growing season.

Luckily, I needn’t have worried. I relaxed when I read the bit about just adding litres and kilograms of product to come up with one unitless number.

Somehow a kilogram of Aphox (density 0.58g/cm3) is the “equivalent” of a litre of Roundup (density 1.27g/cm3).

If this is the level of scientific literacy of those in charge of our food production, I could put whatever I wanted.

I guessed some litres, added some kilograms, threw in some pints of Perridge and how many sausages I’d had for dinner last night, saved it and sent if off.  

That’s my bit of string done. I’m legal and safe from black helicopters again.