If you produce cattle, coffee, cocoa, rubber, soy, palm oil or timber and any of it ends up in the European market, the European Union now wants to know exactly which paddock, block or plantation it came from — and proof that the land it came from hadn't been deforested after 31 December 2020. The European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) has been in force since the end of last year for large operators and from the middle of this year for SMEs, and the documentation requirements landing on producers are unlike anything most farms have dealt with before.
This piece is a plain-language guide to what EUDR actually requires, who it actually applies to, what evidence farmers need to produce, what happens if you can't produce it, and how to be ready without rebuilding your records from scratch.
What EUDR actually is
The EU Deforestation Regulation (formally Regulation (EU) 2023/1115) is an EU law that bans the import or sale, anywhere in the European Union, of seven commodities and their derived products if the commodity was produced on land that was deforested after 31 December 2020.
The law doesn't ask the producer for a statement. It asks the operator — the company that first places the product on the EU market — to file a due diligence statement against every consignment. That statement has to include geolocation coordinates for every plot of land where the commodity was produced, plus enough information to demonstrate the land was deforestation-free since the cut-off date.
The compliance obligation sits with the EU operator. But the evidence has to come from the producer — because the operator can't produce it. The pressure flows up the supply chain to the paddock.
The seven commodities (and what counts as “derived”)
EUDR covers:
- Cattle — including beef, leather, and most cattle-derived products
- Cocoa
- Coffee
- Oil palm — palm oil and palm-oil-based ingredients
- Rubber — natural rubber and rubber products
- Soya — soy beans, soy meal, soy oil
- Wood — timber, sawn wood, paper, pulp, furniture, fuel wood
If your operation produces any of these and your buyer is exporting to the EU, you're in scope. Indirectly in scope is also relevant: if you sell coffee to a roaster who sells to a European chain, the roaster is the operator and they'll be asking you for the evidence.
Who's actually affected
Three groups, roughly in order of who has to do the most work:
- Producers in non-EU exporting countries — Australian beef going to the EU, Brazilian or Australian timber, US soy, Asian and African coffee/cocoa/rubber/palm. The producer doesn't file the due diligence statement, but the producer's records are the evidence.
- EU operators (importers) — file the due diligence statements, hold legal liability, take the penalty if the records don't stack up.
- Downstream traders inside the EU — limited additional checks if they bought from a compliant operator, but they have to keep records.
If your buyer is European, or your buyer's buyer is European, you're feeling the pressure. Even if you sell mostly domestically today, almost every grain trader, processor, abattoir and timber merchant has at least some EU-bound supply. The geolocation requirement gets passed to everyone in their grower base, not just the consignment that happens to go east.
What farmers actually need to provide
For each consignment, the operator's due diligence statement has to include:
- Geolocation of every plot of land where the commodity was produced. Coordinates (latitude / longitude). For plots larger than 4 hectares, the actual polygon — not just a centre point.
- Production country and (for some commodities) sub-national region.
- Date or time range of production.
- Proof of deforestation-free status since 31 December 2020 — meaning the land hadn't been forest (under the EUDR definition) that was then converted to agriculture or plantation after that date.
- Legality attestation — that the production complied with the relevant laws of the country of production (land tenure, environmental, labour, third-party rights, anti-corruption, trade and customs).
- Traceability — a chain of custody from production back through aggregation to the consignment.
The “deforestation-free” attestation is the hard one. EUDR uses the FAO definition of forest, which catches some land that wouldn't be called forest in everyday speech. The cut-off is 31 December 2020 — any land cleared after that date is off-limits for EUDR-eligible production. Forever, not just for a transition period.
For producers, that means you need:
- The current geolocation of every paddock, block or plantation, drawn or imported with reasonable precision
- A way to demonstrate, for each plot, that the land wasn't deforested between 31 December 2020 and today — typically through historical satellite imagery and a clear record of land-use change events
- A way to attach all of the above to a specific consignment when one goes out
What happens if you can't
The penalties land on the operator, not the producer directly. But the operator's response to non-compliance is to exclude the producer. The mechanism is brutal:
- Fines up to 4% of EU annual turnover for the operator — for serious infringements. Operators don't absorb this; they push the consequences upstream by refusing to source from producers who can't provide evidence.
- Confiscation of products and the revenue from any non-compliant consignment.
- Temporary exclusion from EU public procurement and EU public funding.
- Reputational consequences — operators publish lists of non-compliant suppliers; one failed consignment can lose a contract for the season.
The market consequence, even before fines, is that operators will only source from producers who can provide clean, machine-readable EUDR evidence. The producers who can't will quietly lose contracts to producers who can.
What “plot of land” actually means
EUDR draws a distinction between:
- Small plots (under 4 ha) — a single geographic point (lat / long) is acceptable.
- Larger plots (4 ha or more) — a polygon is required, drawn precisely enough that overlap with deforested land can be checked by satellite.
For most broadacre, livestock and tree-crop operations, this means every paddock, block or compartment of 4 ha or more needs an actual polygon — not a centre point.
If you've been operating with hand-drawn paddock maps or rough boundaries on a paper map, that won't survive EUDR. The audit needs proper geolocation with edges accurate to about the nearest 30 metres (Sentinel-2 resolution).
The cooperative / smallholder problem
EUDR allows for grouping in some commodity chains — for example, smallholder coffee or cocoa cooperatives can submit polygon data at the cooperative level rather than per individual farm. But the geolocation, deforestation-free attestation and chain-of-custody still need to be precise.
Cooperatives now have a job that didn't exist three years ago: keeping a registry of every member plot's polygon, its land-use history, and its production over time. The cooperative is the operator's interface; if the cooperative's records don't hold up, none of the cooperative's members can sell into the EU.
This is one of the places where farm software stops being optional. A cooperative serving 200 smallholders cannot manage 200 GIS shapefiles and 200 land-use histories in spreadsheets. Not at the precision EUDR requires.
How to be ready
Practical steps, in roughly the order they pay off:
- Draw or import every paddock polygon. If your existing records have GeoJSON, KML or shapefile exports from John Deere Operations Center, Climate FieldView, Trimble Ag, Google Earth or any other GIS source — get them into your farm software in one place. If you don't have anything yet, this is the moment to do it.
- Capture the historical land-use status of every plot since the 2020 cut-off. Satellite imagery (Sentinel-2 is free and the EU itself uses it) is the standard evidence. The platform you're on should be retaining this automatically — every paddock with a passing satellite tile every 3–5 days, vegetation indices computed, change events flagged.
- Attach production records to plots, not enterprises. A consignment of beef going to the EU needs to be traceable to the paddocks the cattle grazed on — not just to “the farm.” This is the operational shift that breaks most farm record-keeping setups: the unit of accounting moves from the operation to the paddock.
- Generate the geolocation and land-use history on demand. When the operator asks, the producer should be able to export a machine-readable file containing polygons, production dates, and a deforestation-free attestation in under a minute. If that takes a week of GIS consultant time, the contract is at risk.
- Keep five years of records. EUDR requires evidence retention. Records you've kept for compliance are also the records that survive a 2030 audit of a 2025 consignment.
Where a unified platform fits
This is the section where most marketing pieces overreach. The honest version: a unified farm management platform with proper geolocation, satellite-backed land-use history and consignment-to-paddock traceability eliminates the hardest part of EUDR readiness. The records you keep to run the farm — paddock polygons, livestock movements, harvest origin, treatment records — are the records the operator's due diligence statement reads from.
The platform doesn't write the due diligence statement for the operator. It doesn't certify compliance. It doesn't replace the cooperative's legal obligations to its members. What it does is collapse the gap between “producer's actual operating data” and “evidence in the format the operator needs” — so the EU requirement stops being a separate compliance project and becomes a query against your existing ledger.
RedEarthOne captures paddock geolocation by default, integrates Sentinel-2 imagery on every block, and attaches every consignment to the paddocks it came from. The EUDR audit pack is a button, not a project. Full coverage of EUDR alongside other buyer programmes (BCI, BAP, ASC, Rainforest Alliance, Modern Slavery Act, Climate Active) is on the programmes page.
The kicker
Three years ago, EUDR was a regulatory proposal that most exporters didn't take seriously. Two years ago, it was a regulatory probable. Last year, it was a regulatory certainty with a one-year delay. This year, it's the law that decides whether your consignment ships.
The producers who are quietly cleaning up their geolocation records now will keep their contracts. The producers who wait until the operator's first formal request will spend a panicked quarter trying to reconstruct land-use history they don't have. The records exist — the satellite passes over your paddocks every five days whether you ask it to or not. The question is whether they're in a place where you can find them.
Your buyer is going to ask. The earlier you've got the answer ready, the less the answer costs you.
— The RedEarthOne team
RedEarthOne is the operating system for agriculture — one account, one ledger, five connected workspaces plus stakeholder portals, designed against the regulators and the buyer programmes from day one.