A new draft producer standard for Irish farmers is expected to be piloted “early in 2025”, according to Bord Bia.
Stage one of the five stage sign-off process is expected to be completed by the end of this year, allowing for the pilot of the draft standard to commence early next year.
Details of the updated Bord Bia Sustainable Quality Assurance Schemes were outlined at a farmer meeting which took place in Cootehill, Co. Cavan, on Monday evening, September 23.
Speaking at the event, Bord Bia’s agri-sustainability manager Liam McCabe explained to farmers: “We want to sign off stage one across all modules by the end of the year with a view to starting to pilot the draft standard early in 2025.
“We will be factoring in a new audit approach where the objective is to minimise audit time.”
The Bord Bia representative told farmers at the meeting that the key objective to the new audit approach will be “to minimise audit time whilst meeting the needs for a standardised, verifiable mechanism to confirm compliance with the standard that will be recognised internationally”.
He added: “The new process needs to stack up to our customers and it needs to stack up to the Irish National Accreditation Board (INAB) who provide us with our accreditation and it has to deliver on all of those objectives.
“How we’re going to deliver that is that we will move to a risk-based scenario where not everything will be accessed at every farm. Rather than having a standing audit that will be in isolation, we will be moving to rolling audits where each audit builds on the last.”
The Bord Bia representative said there will be particular areas of focus in an audit and they “will be influenced by previous non compliances on the farm”.
“Ultimately what it will lead to is a reduced number of criteria accessed in any given audit which will hopefully minimise the time an auditor needs to spend on your farm.
“Where we need to get to is that were in a position to pilot audit the criteria that we have agreed so we hope to be at this stage at the start of the year [2025]. That’s a critical step in this process,” he explained.
He acknowledged that changes may be needed to the new pilot standard saying: “It’s one thing sitting down agreeing criteria in a room but ultimately we need to see how that’s implemented on farms.
“There will be a lot of learnings from that stage and the feedback from those pilot audits will be going bac to our Technical Advisory Committees (TAC) where they can decide if criteria is too onerous, if it needs to go a step further or whatever the case is. There will be appropriate engagement that will happen thereafter.”
He reassured farmers saying that any changes that are going to come into effect “will be communicated with a significant lead time” and explained that there is going to be “extensive engagement” with representatives as part of this process “to ultimately ensure that the standard is workable and that it’s not adding any significant audit burden”.
Further details and updates from the new Bord Bia pilot audit process will be published on Agriland as they become available.