Farmers struggling with waste rules

New research shows that more than a third (38 per cent) of farmers still find the Waste Management Regulations difficult to understand.

The research, conducted by netregs.gov.uk among NFU members, also revealed that 46 per cent feel swamped by the amount of information they receive on handling waste effectively.

The new NetRegs Agricultural Learning Tool (www.netregs.gov.uk/learning) is intended to combat this information overload by providing the farming community with a simple web-based guidance tool for waste issues.

The NetRegs tool has been pre-tested by the farming community and includes six learning modules to help the user fully understand the different aspects of managing their waste.

Aarun Naik, environmental policy adviser, NFU believes that the NetRegs Agricultural Learning Tool will make information on regulations simpler for farmers to understand and is an important step towards improved compliance.

"The NFU already provides farmers with a wide variety of useful guidance on farm waste. However, this tool provides all the essential information in an easy-to-use format. More farmers are using the web these days to find the information they require. This single access point to all the information online will be a useful resource to help farm businesses to improve their environmental compliance."

Farmer, Michael Jones, has been involved in the pilot testing scheme.

"The NetRegs tool really is very user friendly. It is a very useful one-stop-shop which helps you condense all the information surrounding waste management. Agricultural waste can be an appalling pollutant and the farming community has a duty of care to exemplify best practice to the general public."

Positively, the survey results also reveal that 53 per cent of respondents believe that the Waste Management Regulations 2006 have helped to make their business more environmentally responsible.

However, 44 per cent believe that the regulations have affected their day-to-day work negatively.

This needn't be the case according to Richard Martin, programme manager at NetRegs.

"Our research showed that farmers are currently receiving information from a wide range of sources. In fact, 83 per cent stated that they would welcome a simple tool that would give them all the farm waste information they needed. Understanding waste issues can be made much easier and we believe that the new NetRegs Agricultural Learning Tool achieves this."