The Department of Agriculture is urging farmers and merchants to register for the National Fertiliser Database, which is live on agfood.ie.

All farmers using fertiliser, including lime, will be required by law to be registered by 1 September.

The Department has said that registration is a very simple process.

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Those farmers involved in the import of fertiliser, farm-to-farm transfers and/or retail sale of fertiliser must also register as fertiliser economic operators on agfood.ie.

Also from 1 September, all fertiliser transactions along the supply chain must be recorded.

This includes fertiliser dispatched from merchants’ premises to farms, moving from farm-to-farm or imported.

Automatic upload

Merchants can enter this data manually through agfood.ie or through an application programming interface that facilitates automatic upload of data from retailers’ IT systems directly to the National Fertiliser Database.

Commenting on the launch of the database, Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalogue said: “The roll-out of the National Fertiliser Database is an important milestone and the culmination of a huge effort by my Department together with industry stakeholders over the past 18 months to progress the legislation, the IT infrastructure and the communications plan needed to underpin this database.

"I would like to take this opportunity to thank the members of the stakeholder consultative committee for their constructive engagement during this process.

Benefits

"The National Fertiliser Database will require very little additional work for most farmers and will provide a number of benefits."

The Department will write to all farmers in the coming weeks about the new requirements and Department officials will also have a stand at the National Ploughing Championships where individual queries will be answered and assistance with registration will be provided.

Queries regarding the database should be sent by email to nationalfertilisersdb@agriculture.gov.ie.