Every farming word the programme uses.
Explained without condescension, because the alternative is a viewer who enjoys the show and has no idea what a headland is.
The words.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Brash | Thin, stony soil over limestone. Cotswold brash is fifteen to forty-five centimetres of it, and it drains beautifully and holds almost nothing. |
| Blackgrass | A grass weed with widespread herbicide resistance. Costs about £155 a hectare on infested wheat — roughly fourteen per cent of the potential gross margin. |
| Drilling | Sowing seed. Later drilling is one of the few genuinely effective blackgrass controls. |
| Headland | The strip round the edge of a field where machinery turns. Compacted, lower-yielding, and the first place to look for problems. |
| Gross margin | Enterprise output minus variable costs, before fixed costs. The number most farms have never calculated properly. |
| SFI | Sustainable Farming Incentive. Agri-environment payments, now roughly thirty per cent of average farm income. |
| BPS | Basic Payment Scheme. The old area-based subsidy, being phased out. |
| Lagering | Slow cold conditioning of beer. Takes weeks, ties up a tank, and is what everybody economises on. |
| Min-till | Minimum tillage. Less soil inversion, better structure and water retention, slower results. |
| Cover crop | Something green in the ground over winter to protect and build the soil rather than to sell. |
| Break crop | A non-cereal in the rotation, which resets disease and weed pressure. Oats and rape both do this job. |
| Variable rate | Applying different amounts of seed or fertiliser to different parts of one field. Yield up two to ten per cent, inputs down eight to twenty. |
| Auto-steer | GNSS-guided steering. The fastest-payback technology in precision agriculture, usually under two years. |
| Durum | Hard wheat, grown for pasta rather than bread. |
| Neonicotinoid | A class of insecticide, now banned, whose absence has made oilseed rape a genuine gamble. |
| Flea beetle | Cabbage stem flea beetle. What eats the oilseed rape now that the neonicotinoids have gone. |
| Malting barley | Barley grown to a specification suitable for brewing, which pays more than feed barley. |
| Whole carcass | Using the entire animal rather than the four cuts a supermarket has taught people to want. |
| Farm business tenancy | The modern agricultural tenancy under the 1995 Act. Shorter and weaker than the old 1986 Act tenancies. |
| Grazing licence | Permission to take grass without exclusive possession. The correct structure where a tenancy would be a disaster. |
Why this exists.
Millions of people watch a programme about farming and enjoy it enormously without knowing what a headland is, what drilling means, or why anybody would care about blackgrass.
That is not their failing. It is a failure of everybody in agriculture who has spent decades talking to each other in a private language and then complaining that the public does not understand farming.
Twenty terms
And growing, when people ask.
No condescension
Which is the whole brief.
As used on screen
Every word the programme actually uses.
Ask for more
Missing words get added.
Ask about one.
If a word is missing, ask and it goes on the list.
What people actually ask.
The two questions this page gets most, answered without a support ticket.
It is not. It is what six years of expensive mistakes taught us, written down so you can make cheaper ones.
The reading and the video are remote. The field days are not, for the obvious reason.
Pestering, at your invitation
We named the newsletter after the imposition so that opting in means something. Unsubscribe in one click and we will not chase you.
