Documents

The book issues two forms. The zootechnical certificate follows Regulation (EU) 2016/1012 — the same one under which purebred animals are traded in Europe: fifteen sections and two rows of ancestors, with the order and composition of fields set by the regulation rather than by us. The herdbook certificate is for breeding work: three rows of ancestors with breeding values and lactations.

A document is assembled from the book at the moment of issue and stored together with the code by which it can be verified. What has been issued cannot be altered: editing the data afterwards creates a new document, and the previous one remains, marked as withdrawn.

Before issue the form checks itself: the system will not release a document if a mandatory field is missing, the required rows of the pedigree are incomplete, or a DNA test has excluded the parentage. A complete series of test-day records is required earlier, at verification, without which no certificate is issued at all. This is the essential difference from a form typed in a word processor — there the error is noticed by the buyer.

The document has no legal force, and we do not conceal that: force is conferred by a recognised organisation, not by software. Nor does a recognised third party currently exist for Russian breeding organisations — membership of the European Holstein and Red Holstein Confederation has been suspended since July 2022, and that is the position of the industry, not our omission.

Since external endorsement is unavailable, the weight of the document comes from what the buyer can verify without asking anyone for permission: the form is international and published, the checks run before issue and identically for everyone, what has been issued does not change, and the code allows authenticity to be confirmed in a minute. Trust built this way rests on traceability rather than on a stamp — and that is the one part nobody else can revoke.

What our arrangement lacks by international rules is listed on the compliance page: external audit of procedures (the ICAR Certificate of Quality), storage of genotypes, participation in the international MACE evaluation. We name these ourselves, because a list of nothing but ticks is exactly what the first specialist checks — and he checks it on the items that are missing.