If you want to converse amiably with a farmer, there are really only sixty or seventy arcane farming tools whose names you need to memorise. Frank provides a handy list…
Regular readers will know that I am a keen listener to BBC Radio Four’s early morning Farming Today programme. I am not, of course, a farmer myself, but my daily listening habit has made me wonder how I would acquit myself if I happened to fall into conversation with a farmer. Obviously I would want to be able to hold my own, and to demonstrate a familiarity with rustic ways. To this end, I recently memorised a list of vintage farm implements, and have been practising dropping several of these casually into my conversation. So, if and when I do engage in a chinwag with a bona fide farmer, I will be well prepared. You might wish to commit the list to memory, too.
A churn, some bindles, a bean stubble rake, gorse pincers, a clodding mell, two Kentish binding rakes, a disc coulter and a subsoil pulveriser plough, a potato grading shovel, five Morris’s turnip fly catchers, two hand-cranked threshers, a seed rusky, an automatic sheaf tying mechanism, a whin bruiser, Keevil’s cheese-making apparatus, a mouldbaert, fan tackle and chogger, a Nellis fork, a plough graip, half a dozen liquid manure pumps, a pair of hedger’s gloves, Gilbert’s improved iron sack holder, four American butter separators, a cauterising iron, a mouth cramp, a charlock slasher, eight barley hummellers, an adze, a curd agitator, grinding stones, Drummond’s iron harvest sickle, a dairymaid’s yoke, a clod knocker, Biddell’s scarifier, Fowler’s self-adjusting anchor, a bitting iron, fifteen creels, two caschroms, a dung hack, a Crees lactator, five horn trainers, a fagging stick, a pea hook, two Lipmann glass stoppers, a trenching fork, Gilbee’s horse hoe, a drain ladle, hackle prongs, a flax brake, Hall’s smut machine, a heckling board, three flauchter spades, a hay tedder, an Ivel three-wheeled petrol-powered machine, Finlayson’s grubber, a potato riddle, four root pulpers, paring mattocks, Morton’s revolving harrow, Samuelson’s cake-breaking machine, a foot pick, sheep netting, two oilcake crushers, Reade’s patent syringe, various instruments for destroying moles, a barrow turnip slicer, a Paul net, a Sandwich clean-sweep hay-loader, probangs, castrating shears, Hannaford’s wet wheat pickling machine, a scutching board, a swath turner, a plank-drag harrow, and Blurton’s tumbling cheese rack.
Farmers don’t hold conversations, they have whinge-in’s……weather, price of feed, CAP, aren’t Range Rovers getting expensive.
If you must then you will need to study sat-nav ploughing and grant milking, the price of tups and how to sell land to the wind farm gravy train. Easiest way to upset them, I have found, is note that their machine is a Mengele and, by the way, they do know, don’t they, that’s the doktor death Mengele family who, allegedly, aided the laddo during his South American jaunt, works every time.