Crop Farmer CV Examples & Writing Guide

This sample is an arable farmer who farms his own land plus rented and contract-farmed land, and who worked for a larger estate before that. In the UK this job is often advertised as arable farmer. The name, farms and college are invented. Change the hectares, crops, yields and machinery to yours. If you grow vegetables or salad crops, the shape still works: swap tonnes of grain for trays, tonnes of produce or veg box customers.

Most crop farmers never write a CV until they need one for something specific, and the something changes what goes on the page. Work out which of these you are doing before you start.

• Applying for a farm manager or arable foreman job on someone else's farm or estate. Lead with hectares managed, crops, machinery and team size. This is the closest to a normal CV.
• Applying to an agricultural business: seed, agrochemical distributor, machinery dealer, farmer co-operative, grain merchant, crop insurance, precision farming services. They want your agronomy knowledge and your ability to talk to farmers. Qualifications and software matter more here.
• Taking on more land through a Farm Business Tenancy or a contract farming agreement with a landowner or land agent. Yields, environmental schemes, record keeping, insurance and how long you have kept tenancies are the argument.
• Applying for finance or a grant with a bank's agricultural manager or a government scheme. They want production history, hectares, records and any formal training. Attach it to the business plan rather than sending it alone.
• Selling to buyers: a packer, a supermarket supplier, a restaurant group. Assurance status (Red Tractor, GLOBALG.A.P.) and audit history are what they are checking, not your machinery list.

“When a grower sends me a CV for a farm manager role, the first thing I look for is whether they have ever been responsible for a decision that cost money. Acres and horsepower are easy to write. Tell me a season that went wrong and what you did about it, and I will read the rest of the page.”

Three or four lines. Hectares, crops, years, one yield or business number, one certificate. A career objective is worth using only if you are moving into farming from another field or starting out.

Farm CVs tend to describe seasons rather than results. Attach a number to every claim: hectares, tonnes, £ per hectare, days, head count, loads. Below are bullets by area of the business.

Three groups: what you grow, what you drive, and how you run the business. The third group is the one most farm CVs leave out and the one that gets you hired to manage someone else's land.

Production and agronomy:

• The crops you have grown, by name and hectares
• Cultivation systems: ploughing, min-till, strip-till, direct drilling, cover crops
• Soil sampling, nutrient management planning and variable rate application
• Crop walking: weed, pest and disease identification
• Herbicide programmes and resistance management (blackgrass, for example)
• Irrigation scheduling within abstraction licence limits, if you irrigate
• Variety choice and trial plots

Machinery and operations:

• Tractors by horsepower, drills by width and type, combines by header width
• Self-propelled and trailed sprayers, boom width, nozzle choice and calibration
• RTK auto-steer, section control, yield mapping
• Grain handling: augers, chaser bins, dryers, store management
• Field servicing, hydraulics, welding and in-season repair
• Lorry and grain trailer haulage, and your C or C+E licence if you hold one

Business and records:

• Farm management software: John Deere Operations Center, Gatekeeper, Climate FieldView, or your own spreadsheets
• Grain marketing, pools and basic hedging
• Rural Payments, SFI and Countryside Stewardship paperwork
• Rent reviews and tenancy or contract farming negotiations with landowners and agents
• Cost of production per hectare and per tonne
• Recruiting, rotas and safety training for seasonal staff
• Machinery purchase, lease and depreciation decisions

Farming has fewer required qualifications than the trades, but the ones that exist carry weight. Only list what you actually hold.

• Pesticide application certificates. To apply professional pesticides you generally need PA1 (the foundation module) plus the module for your kit, such as PA2 for boom sprayers or PA6 for knapsack sprayers, from City & Guilds NPTC or Lantra. NRoSO membership shows you keep up to date, and assurance schemes generally expect it. Name the modules you hold.
• BASIS Certificate in Crop Protection, the recognised qualification for agronomists who give pesticide recommendations, and FACTS for fertiliser advice. Not needed to farm, but valuable if you are moving towards agronomy services or sales.
• Red Tractor Fresh Produce or GLOBALG.A.P. certification, if you grow fruit or vegetables for packers or supermarkets. Buyers ask for it by name.
• Your assurance audit history if you sell into the supply chain. List the scheme, the year and the result.
• Organic certification is issued to the holding through an approved control body (for example the Soil Association or Organic Farmers & Growers), not to you personally. Write it as "farm certified organic since 2021", not as a personal qualification.
• Driving licence: a car licence covers tractors on the road; a C or C+E licence with a Driver CPC card if you haul by lorry. Agricultural exemptions depend on the vehicle and the journey, so say what you actually hold rather than guessing.
• Safety training that employers and insurers like to see: grain store and confined space entry, telehandler (Lantra or City & Guilds NPTC), first aid, IOSH Working Safely, and moving wide machinery on the road.
• Education: a degree is not required to farm, and plenty of successful farmers do not have one. A Level 3 diploma, foundation degree or degree in agriculture or agribusiness does help for managed-farm and agribusiness roles. AHDB events and courses, discussion groups and a Nuffield Farming Scholarship are all worth a line.

Plenty of people have helped with machinery since their early teens and have nothing that looks like employment history. That is a formatting problem, not an experience problem.

1. 1Give the family farm a proper job entry: farm name, your title (farm hand, then tractor driver, then farm operator), dates and hectares. It is a business and it counts.
2. 2Split it into roles if your responsibility grew, so the reader can see the progression instead of one fifteen-year block.
3. 3List the machines by size and the operations you ran on your own. "Drilled 320 hectares solo with a 6 m drill" says more than a title ever will.
4. 4Add the seasonal and contract work: harvest teams, rogueing, contract spraying, grain haulage, the grain store intake at harvest, the beet campaign.
5. 5Get PA1 and PA2 before you apply. They are affordable, checkable and they separate you from someone who just drove a tractor.
6. 6Add Young Farmers' Club, an NFU branch committee or a county show committee. In farming these are read as community standing, not as filler.

• One to two pages. Two is normal if you are listing several farms, environmental schemes and machinery.
• Add a short "Farm at a glance" block near the top: hectares, crops, cultivation system, storage capacity, irrigation, main machinery. Anyone in farming can read that in five seconds.
• No photo, no date of birth, no marital status in the UK. If the CV is going to a bank or a landowner, keep it just as plain.
• PDF, single column. Agricultural businesses and co-operatives screen through the same tracking systems everyone else uses.
• Mirror the advert's words: agronomy, crop walking, variable rate, precision farming, min-till, direct drilling, cover crops, grain marketing, SFI, Red Tractor, PA1/PA2, BASIS, and the specific crops.
• Use the local unit and the local crop names. Tonnes per hectare in the UK, and say the county or region, because yield only means something against local land.
• If you grow vegetables or salad crops, swap tonnes of grain for the units your buyers use: trays, tonnes of produce, veg box customers, market days, restaurant accounts.

In the US the same job is usually called a crop or row crop farmer and the document is a resume, with acres and bushels per acre instead of hectares and tonnes per hectare. Applying in the US, use the US conventions throughout and convert the units, because a US reader will not do the arithmetic. One clause is enough: "320 hectares (about 790 acres) of wheat, barley and oilseed rape".