Annual Logbook Guidance

Each year, we ask that you please complete an Annual Logbook as part of your membership of the Regenerate Outcomes programme. In this logbook, you let us know how you have managed each field entered into the programme over the last year. We need this information to enable soil carbon credits to potentially be generated from fields where you have made positive management changes and to demonstrate the eligibility of those fields to the independent programme Verification Body.  

We also ask for information on total fuel use, livestock numbers, and fertiliser, manure and lime usage, so that we can monitor your overall farm emissions and potentially generate verified credits from reductions in some farm emissions. 

There are also a small number of Attestations in a separate tab, that we need you to confirm each year. 

In the sections below, we have provided guidance on how each section of the logbook should be completed, including short videos demonstrating the completion of each section. The Regenerate Outcomes team are on hand to help you complete the logbook, so please get in touch via email or phone call if you have any questions on how best to complete the logbook, and we’ll be happy to help. 

The Annual Logbook covers the farming year from 1st November 2024 until 31st October 2025. We ask that you please complete your Annual Logbook by Friday 5th December 2025. We will then review your logbook and get in touch if we have any follow up questions. 

Field details 

To generate carbon credits from your farm, we need to be able to match your field information back to the digital map of your farm. We download this from Rural Payments (England/Wales/Scotland) when you first join the programme, then again each year that you are in the programme, so we can follow any changes you make to field IDs, boundaries or areas. If you have made any changes in the last year to fields in the programme, it is very important that you tell us in this section. We can still keep all of the relevant land in the programme, we just need to accurately match the areas of land to the management information in your logbooks, so that you get the right number of carbon credits. 

Please check the Maps tab to confirm we have a correct record of the fields you have entered into the programme. If there are any mistakes here, please update the “Currently included in the programme” column in the Field Practices tab, and let a member of the team know. 

Management groups 

This is the most important section in the logbook for saving you time.  

We recognise that you will likely have multiple fields that you manage in a similar way. For example, all of the winter wheat fields on a farm will likely have similar establishment, harvest, fertiliser and yield information. Similarly, a number of grass fields may be grazed or cut for silage following a similar regime.  

It is highly worth you taking some time to group your fields by Management in this column. You could use letters (Group A, Group B, etc) or pick the lead field “same as Big field” for example. You can have as many management groups as you need. We also recognise that not every field will necessarily fit into a management group, so you can just fill out the logbook for those individual fields separately. 

You just need to fill out the rest of the logbook once for each Management Group. We can then populate the rest of the fields using the information you provided. If fields in a management group are similar other than in one or two aspects, still put them in a management group then just note the relevant differences in the affected field. 

We recognise that farm management is dynamic, so fields won’t necessarily be in the same management group from one year to the next. You can change management groups each year in your logbook. This grouping is simply to help speed up completing the logbook for you, and doesn’t otherwise affect how the fields are treated in the programme.  

Crop and pasture description 

  • For arable, briefly state the crop grown that was harvested in this logbook year. For example, “winter wheat”, “spring barley”. Please record any undersown leys or intercropping here, e.g. “winter wheat intercropped with winter beans” or “spring barley undersown with herbal ley”. Please don’t include standalone cover crops here, they should be recorded in the “Describe cover crops” column. 

    For grass and pasture, where this has not been reseeded in the last five years, describing as “permanent pasture” will suffice. For more recent reseeds, try and briefly describe the general mix, e.g. “perennial ryegrass – white clover ley”, or “herbal ley” or “red clover ley” etc.  

  • For arable, this should be for the crop harvested in the relevant logbook year. For example, spring barley sown in April 25 and harvested in August 25, or winter wheat drilledsown in October 2024 and harvested in July 2025. For pasture, if this has been reseeded in the last year, please provide the date here. 

  • We have provided drop-down options for the main establishment options for crop drilling or pasture reseeds. Please select the one which most closely matches the approach you used. 

  • Please estimate the legume content in the field. For legume arable cash crops such as peas or beans, this would be 100%. For older permanent pastures, legume content (wild white clover) is typically estimated at 10%. For newer leys and arable cover crops or intercrops, it is probably best to go off the legume content of the seed mix and you can make an adjustment if necessary for establishment success. 

  • Briefly describe any winter cover crops used in the logbook year prior to establishing a spring crop (or summer cover crops where no cash crop was grown) 

Crop and grass harvesting 

  • For arable cash crops, this is the date harvested in the current logbook year. This is not applicable for grass fields. 

  • Please provide an estimate of the yield. It is ok if this is the average yield of that crop across the farm, rather than the yield specific to that field. Please provide in tonnes per hectare. 

  • For arable crops, we need to know what happened to the straw. We’ve provided some drop-down options; please select the one that is most relevant or if needed simply type your approach in the relevant cell. 

  • If you bale the straw off the field rather than chop it behind the combine, we need to know the yield of straw. Again, this can be the average straw yield of that crop across your farm, rather than specific to that field. 

  • This is simply the numbers of cuts for silage or hay in that year. For arable silage or wholecrop, this should be captured as “Wholecrop / arable silage” in the crop residue treatment column, rather than as a silage/hay cut here. 

  • We’ve provided some drop down options; please select the one that is most relevant. We are referring here to the primary crop (e.g. wheat cereal, grass silage) rather than any straw also taken off the field. 

Diversity and living roots 

  • We’re interested in how many of the three broad functional groups of plant species are present: 

    • Grasses or cereals. This includes all pasture grasses, arable cereals and maize 

    • Legumes: this includes arable cash crops such as peas and beans, and forage legumes such as white and red clover, lucerne, sainfoin, vetch, birdsfoot trefoil etc. 

    • Other broadleaf herbs: this is everything else, including forage herbs such as chicory and plantain, brassica crops including oilseed rape, kale, turnips etc, root crops including potatoes and sugar beet, etc. 

  • This is the number of days with a living plant in the ground. For permanent pasture with no reseeding in that year, this will be 365. For anything that has been established in that year, you need to account for the period of time between the last crop being harvested or ley / cover crop being terminated, and the next crop or ley established. E.g. a field ploughed mid-March and drilled mid-April with grass would have days of living root of 330. 

Grazing 

For every field, we need to know whether grazing livestock were present in that year, and if so, during the time when they were present, were they set stocked or rotationally grazed. We would consider a field to be set stocked if grazing livestock are continuously present across the field for two weeks or more.  

Where fields are rotationally grazed (this includes mob grazing, adaptive multi-paddock grazing and other similar terms), we need to know the average grazing period and rest period in the rotation. For example, if livestock are in each paddock for 3 days on a 30 day rotation, then this would be Grazing period 3 days; Rest period 27 days. This applies even if the rotation includes multiple fields, the grazing and rest periods per paddock will still be applicable to each field. Crucially, we’re interested in grazing and rest periods per rotation, not the total number of days grazed over the year. 

We understand that adaptive grazing involves grazing rotation lengths being dynamic across the season; please try and estimate the average grazing and rest days in this instance. For example, if you move livestock every 1 to 3 days, you might enter a grazing period of 2 days. Similarly, if rest periods range from 30 to 90 days, you could enter a rest period of 60 days. 

Fertiliser, manure and lime 

  • We need to know the kilos of Nitrogen applied per hectare from synthetic fertiliser (bagged or liquid). Please provide this as kg N per hectare. This figure is a total across the year, which may be comprised of applications of different products.  

    You may need to convert this from the units you typically work in (e.g. kg / acre, bags / acre, cwt / acre). Please let us know if you require any help with this. We don’t need to know about applications of fertiliser that doesn’t contain any nitrogen, e.g. P & K only blends. 

  • We ask for applications of Farmyard Manure, Chicken litter and other solid manure types (dry digestate, sewage biosolids, municipal compost) in tonnes of product per hectare. You can hopefully estimate this from spreader capacity, contractors invoices or delivery receipts. Please provide slurry in litres per hectare, which you can hopefully estimate from tanker capacity. 

    If you apply one of the “other” manure types, i.e. digestate, sewage biosolids, municipal compost etc, please let us know which of these products this is when you provide the application rates. 

  • We’ve provided the three main forms of lime (bulk calcium lime, bulk magnesium lime, calcifert prills) as drop downs; please select the most relevant option or tell us if you use a different production. We also need the application rate in tonnes of product per hectare. For calcifert, we recognize that these application rates will look low (e.g. 0.15 t / ha) 

Irrigation, cides and agroforestry 

  • If you irrigate any fields, we need to know the litres of water applied per hectare in that year. This is very important so that we can adjust the carbon model accordingly to account for the extra rainfall equivalent. 

  • For herbicides, fungicides and insecticides, we simply ask for number of sprayer passes in a year. For example, a conventional winter wheat crop may include 2 herbicides and 3 fungicide passes. Herbicide passes include burning off fields with glyphosate prior to reseeding or drilling.  

  • We can generate carbon credits from the woody biomass in any agroforestry trees that you have planted since you joined the programme. We need to record key information at this stage so that we can monitor these trees going forward. We also need to know about any trees already present in the field before you joined the programme, because even though you cannot earn any carbon credits from the trees themselves, we will need to account for their carbon contribution to the soil in our carbon model. 

    If agroforestry is present in the field, we need to know the number of trees across the field, the Month and Year when they were planted, and the species present.  

Farm emissions 

If you farm a larger area of land than you’ve included in the Regenerate Outcomes programme, then it would be best to only include the proportion of fuel / livestock numbers / fertiliser / manure etc. relevant to the programme on an area basis. For example, if you farm 200 ha and have included 150 ha in the RO programme, and your total diesel use is 10,000 L, then you would report 7500 L in the logbook here. 

For livestock numbers, we set 1st November as the point in the production year to record livestock numbers. For many farms, this corresponds to when the numbers of trading stock are relatively low and breeding stock are relatively stable. We also ask for information on lambs and calves born on the farm over the previous year (Nov to Oct), to account for the fact that many lambs will already be sold by 1st Nov, or store lambs bought in by then.

Please be aware that any increases in manure applications since you join the programme will not be eligible for increasing soil carbon stocks. If you report manure applications in your Lookback Logbook, you can continue this same level of application in your Annual Logbook. However, if you increase applications from your Lookback to your Annual logbooks, then the carbon content of this extra manure will be deducted from any soil carbon sequestration you achieve on fields entered into the programme. This is because the Verified Carbon Standard assumes that any extra manure was previously being applied somewhere else and so contributing to soil carbon stocks elsewhere. This is known as “leakage” in Verra terminology. If you increase manure applications on your farm, please contact a member of the Regenerate Outcomes team to discuss the context of this and explore if there is any mitigating evidence that we can submit to Verra. 

You may be required to provide some evidence of your farm emissions to the independent programme Verification Body. In the column titled “Briefly describe evidence that could be provided to substantiate”, please make some brief notes explaining how you arrived at the value provided, and any evidence you could produce to support this if required. For example, for fuel use you may state “Fuel receipts, available on request”. For livestock numbers, you may say “British Cattle Movement Service records” or “Annual government inventory”. For fertiliser, you could say “Invoices from purchase” or “Fertiliser stock records for Farm Assurance”. You will only need to produce this evidence (in confidence) if requested by the Programme Verifier, but it is worth having some evidence sources in mind for this. 

In the Checks tab, we compare information in the Field Practices and Farm Emissions tab to ensure they align. For example, if you’ve reported 800 tonnes of FYM produced on farm in the Farm Emissions tab, we need to make sure that this matches the total manure applications in the Field Practices tab.  

You might find this tab useful to make sure that you’ve filled in the logbook correctly. For example, you might have had to guestimate your total FYM production but have reasonable confidence over your spreader capacity and therefore total FYM applied. In that instance, you may choose to match FYM in Farm Emissions with the total from your Field Practices, and so on.