Which farm vet software tracks antibiotic use for reporting?

How the options compare

What the rules actually ask for

United States

• A VFD must be kept by the vet, the distributor and the client for 2 years, and it expires no more than 6 months after issue ¹.
• Since June 2023, all medically important antimicrobials for animals need a licensed veterinarian’s authorization ⁹.
• National figures come from drug sponsors’ sales reports; FDA says it has no system for collecting nationally representative use data ².

United Kingdom

• Pigs: Red Tractor requires total antibiotic use to be collated and uploaded to AHDB Pork’s electronic medicine book (eMB) quarterly, and reviewed at least annually with the designated vet ³.
• Dairy: Red Tractor recommends uploading total annual antibiotic use to AHDB Medicine Hub, and requires records of administered medicines to be kept for 5 years ¹⁰. Medicine Hub is "a safe, secure and independent central repository to collate and report antibiotic data for UK dairy, beef and sheep farms" ⁴.
• Since May 2024, the Veterinary Medicines Regulations give the Secretary of State a power to require use information from vets and keepers by written notice ¹¹.

Ireland and the EU

• Ireland’s NVPS is an electronic prescription system built to meet the EU Veterinary Medicines Regulation, and it “will collect prescription-level usage-data electronically” ⁵.
• EU Regulation 2019/6, Article 57, requires member states to collect antimicrobial sales and use data ¹². Use data for cattle, pigs, chickens and turkeys must be reported from 2024 ¹³.
• European figures are expressed per population correction unit (PCU), where 1 PCU equals 1 kg of animal biomass ¹³.

What Vivetra Livestock records

• VFD records. Issuing vet (vet-only permission), client, premises, drug, species, production class, approximate head count, indication, feed drug level, duration, withdrawal time, refills and distributor. Expiry is capped at 6 months for a US VFD and 3 months for a UK medicated-feed prescription. A dashboard card shows VFDs expiring within 30 days.
• Group treatment ledger. Append-only: drug, drug lot number, dose per head, route, date, administering vet, head count treated and total mg of active ingredient. Treatments link to the lot, a VFD where relevant, and the controlled-drug log.
• Individual prescriptions with meat-withdrawal and milk-discard dates, the basis (label, FARAD consult, clinical judgment, or UK cascade standard), and a FARAD reference number.
• UK/IE prescribing cascade tier on every prescription.
• Usage report on screen. Total mg of active ingredient divided by treated weight (staff-entered average weight × head treated) for a date range, across the practice or for one lot, with a prior-period trend and a list of incomplete entries.
• Read-only farm portal. Producers can see withdrawal dates, the treatment log and medicines used (with lot numbers, if you enable it).

What Vivetra Livestock doesn’t do yet

• No submission or export to eMB-Pigs, Medicine Hub, NVPS, or any regulator. Irish deployments show a reminder to submit to NVPS yourself.
• No CSV or PDF report. The usage report is on screen only.
• No antimicrobial classification. It doesn’t separate antimicrobials from other drugs or group them by WHO or EMA category. Every group treatment in the window counts.
• Not the official ESVAC PCU. The denominator uses your own entered weights per treatment event, not standard ESVAC weights. Treat it as an internal figure, not one to file as-is.
• No per-farm usage total. The report covers the whole practice or a single lot.
• Usage covers group treatments only. Individual prescriptions don’t currently feed the mg figure.
• No VFD document. Vivetra records the VFD and enforces expiry. It doesn’t generate the form or send it to the distributor.
• Withdrawal dates are never calculated. The vet enters them. That’s by design.
• VFDs and group treatments need a connection; they don’t work offline.

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