Medicine book requirements for UK farms (and how to ditch the paper one)

What the UK requires you to record in your medicine book, how long you need to keep it, and why a digital one will save you hours every month.

Every UK livestock keeper has to keep a medicine book. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got two sheep or two thousand — the law is the same.

Here’s what you actually need to record, how long for, and why moving off paper is the single highest-value record-keeping change most smallholders can make.

What the law requires

You must record, for every veterinary medicine you administer:

The animal(s) treated — identified by tag number or batch
The date of administration
The name of the medicine (including strength and form)
The batch number of the medicine
The amount administered
The withdrawal period (meat and milk, where applicable)
Who administered it (you, the vet, a contractor)
The reason for treatment

You must keep these records for at least 5 years, even if the animal is no longer alive or has been sold on.

What inspectors actually check

In an RPA inspection or a Red Tractor / farm assurance audit, the most common medicine-book findings are:

Missing batch numbers (very common with paper books — easy to forget)
Withdrawal period not recorded
Treatment recorded but no animal ID
Records out of date order
Records missing entirely for the last few weeks

Almost all of these are paper-book problems. A digital medicine book solves them in different ways — autocomplete for medicine names, automatic withdrawal calculation, mandatory fields you can’t skip, and date stamps you can’t fudge.

Why paper books fail

Three reasons, in order:

You don’t have the book on you when you need it. Treating in the field at 8pm and the book’s in the kitchen. You write it on your hand and forget. Repeat 50 times a year.
Withdrawal periods are easy to miss. You treated three weeks ago and you want to send to slaughter — was it 28 days or 35 days? Find the medicine bottle. Hope you still have it.
Searching is impossible. “When did I last wormer the in-lamb ewes?” You’re flicking through 40 pages.

What a digital medicine book gives you

In your pocket — log treatments where you actually administer them.
Automatic withdrawal countdown — Tractr warns you before you sell an animal that’s still in withdrawal.
Batch numbers prompted — you can’t skip them.
Searchable history per animal — “what’s this ewe ever been treated with?” is a one-tap answer.
Inspection-ready PDFs — print a clean report for the vet or RPA in 10 seconds.

It’s not magic. It’s just paper, done properly.

Try Tractr’s medicine book free →

This article is a plain-English summary, not legal advice. Always check current VMD guidance for the latest requirements.