Spreading at several farms

For landspreading and mobile plant: one permit, more than one deployment, and how to record a day that covers several farms. Takes about five minutes to set up, once.

The short version. Your permit stays the same everywhere. Each farm you deploy to goes in once as its own place, and after that a day spread across three farms is one day sheet with three names down a column.

Step 1Add each farm you deploy to

Open Sites and press Add another site. For each farm, put in:

the farm name — and if you have two deployments on the same farm, put the deployment reference in the name so you can tell them apart, for example Four Oaks Farm — deployment 2;
its address and postcode, which is what Defra record as the place the waste arrived;
your permit number — the same one every time. It does not change per farm.

Use the same permit number on every one. It is one permit covering all your deployments, so putting a different number on a farm would file the load against a permit that does not exist. What tells two deployments apart is the deployment reference, not the permit.

Step 2Fill in what is the same every time

On each farm, set the usual carrier and their registration number, and the waste you normally spread. That is what makes a load quick: everything that rarely changes is already there, and whoever is recording types only what is different.

Step 3A day across several farms

Once you have more than one farm, the Day sheet changes shape on its own:

every row gains a Site column, so you pick which farm that load went to;
a + farm name button appears for each farm, to add a row already set to it;
the total at the bottom splits per farm as well as giving the day's total.

So a day spread across three farms is one sheet, with three names down that column, and you fill in a time and a weight for each load.

Different waste on one day? The Waste box on each row takes a different code, or just a word like sludge, and it changes that row only. Loads from different producers on the same day sit happily on the same sheet.

Step 4Waste produced on your own land

If something did not come in off another business, there is a reason on the load for waste produced on site, so you are not hunting for a carrier registration number that does not exist.

The bit people get wrong

The address Defra want on a load is the place the waste actually arrived — the farm you spread at, not your own yard. That is the whole reason each deployment goes in separately. Get that right and everything else follows.

Still stuck?

Email wilf@byrnedigitalsolutions.co.uk and say which screen you are on. Email is the quickest way to reach me — I reply the same working day.

Defra's own helpline, for anything about the rules rather than the software, is 03000 203 781, Monday to Friday, 8am to 5pm.