Farm Manager CV Examples & Writing Guide

Twelve years, from machinery operator to running a 1,300-hectare farm with a suckler herd. The person is fictional, but the numbers are the kind an owner or a land agent actually asks about: hectares, head, yield, cost per hectare, and who you had working for you.

Farm manager jobs are trust jobs. The owner is handing over machinery worth millions, a crop that only happens once a year, and often their family's land. Five things settle it.

• Scale and enterprise mix. Hectares, head, poultry sheds, glasshouses or buildings, and what you produced. Managing 250 hectares of grassland is not the same job as 1,300 hectares of combinable crops.
• Production numbers. Tonnes per hectare, litres per cow, feed conversion, weaning weight, pack-out percentage. This is your track record and it is checkable.
• The money. Did you hold a budget, buy inputs, negotiate tenancies, market grain or livestock? A manager who has only run field work is really a foreman, and pay follows the difference.
• Labour. Team size, seasonal recruitment, work with licensed labour providers, safety record and staff turnover. Labour is the hardest part of most farm businesses right now.
• Compliance and records. PA certificates and spray records, the nutrient management plan and NVZ rules, Red Tractor and other assurance audits, animal welfare and medicine records. An owner who has been through an inspection cares deeply.

“Show me acres, head and budget in the first three lines, then one production number I can compare to my own. After that I want to know how many people reported to you and whether you kept them. Anybody can run a tractor. Finding somebody who can hold a crew together through harvest is the hard part.”

Three lines that fit the farm you are applying to. A dairy farm will not read an arable personal statement carefully, so write the version that matches.

Every bullet should carry a size, a rate or a £ figure. Farming is a numbers business and owners read it that way.

Group them into production, business, people and compliance. The mix tells the owner whether you are a production manager, a business manager or both.

• Production: cropping plans and rotations, agronomy and soil fertility, variety selection, spray programmes, irrigation scheduling, harvest logistics, livestock health and nutrition, breeding and calving, grazing management, ventilation and housing for poultry and pigs
• Machinery and technology: tractors, drills, sprayers, combines, chaser bins and lorries; scheduled maintenance and repair; RTK guidance and auto-steer; variable rate and yield mapping; Climate FieldView, John Deere Operations Center, Gatekeeper or similar
• Business: operating budgets, cost per hectare or per head, cash flow, farm business accounts, input buying and negotiation, grain and livestock marketing, Rural Payments and the Sustainable Farming Incentive (in England, BPS has been replaced by delinked payments), Countryside Stewardship, tenancies and contract farming agreements, farm accounts in Sage, Xero or a farm-specific package
• People: recruiting, rotas and training, seasonal staff and labour providers, supervising mixed-language teams if you have done it, health and safety, payroll and working time records, keeping a team together through harvest
• Compliance and records: PA certificates and spray records, nutrient management plans and NVZ rules, cross compliance where it still applies, food safety audits (Red Tractor, GLOBALG.A.P., LEAF Marque), animal health plans and medicine records, organic certification records

If you speak a language your seasonal team uses (Polish, Romanian or Bulgarian, for example) and supervise in it, say so clearly. On farms with large seasonal teams it is one of the things an owner looks for first.

There is no farm manager licence in the UK, but several real qualifications carry weight, and PA certificates are generally required before anyone applies professional pesticides at work.

• Pesticide application certificates: PA1 plus the modules for the kit used (PA2 for boom sprayers, PA6 for knapsack sprayers), from City & Guilds NPTC or Lantra, with NRoSO membership to show you keep up to date. List the modules and that your membership is current.
• BASIS Certificate in Crop Protection, the recognised qualification for giving pesticide recommendations, and FACTS for fertiliser and nutrient management advice. Both signal agronomy depth beyond field experience; keep your professional register membership current.
• Livestock assurance: Red Tractor Beef and Lamb or Dairy, responsible use of veterinary medicines training, and a Certificate of Competence for transporting animals if you move stock on longer journeys.
• Poultry: Red Tractor Poultry standards and your processor's audits.
• Fresh produce: Red Tractor Fresh Produce, GLOBALG.A.P., LEAF Marque or BRCGS for packhouses, depending on your buyers.
• Health and safety: IOSH Managing Safely, or a NEBOSH certificate on larger estates, plus a C or C+E licence with a Driver CPC card if you haul grain, livestock or machinery. It comes up more often than people expect.
• Education: a Level 3 diploma, foundation degree or degree in agriculture, agribusiness, animal science or rural business management is common on larger estates and in contract farming businesses, but a long production record with numbers can outweigh it. Membership of a professional body such as the Institute of Agricultural Management is worth a line.
• Anything unusual that saves the owner money: welding, hydraulics, borehole and pump repair, or building and drainage work.

Most farm managers came off the machinery or out of the cattle shed. If you have not held the title yet, the CV has to show you already do parts of the job.

1. 1List the decisions you already make: spray timing, breeding calls, harvest order, ordering parts, deciding when a field is fit to drill.
2. 2Count the people you direct, even informally. "Directed a 4-person drilling team for six weeks" is management experience.
3. 3Show the money you touch, such as input orders you place, parts accounts you run, or a fuel budget you track.
4. 4Add the records you keep. Owners hire managers who document, because that is what an audit or a meeting with the land agent turns on.
5. 5Get your PA certificates and a safety qualification such as IOSH Working Safely before you apply. They are affordable and they take an objection off the table.
6. 6Aim for assistant farm manager, head herdsperson, arable foreman or unit manager as the step in between.

• One page if you have under ten years, two if you have run several farms or multiple enterprises. No photo, no date of birth, no marital status.
• Put hectares, head and budget in your personal statement. Land agents, contract farming businesses and larger estates screen on those three figures.
• Use the exact title from the advert: farm manager, farm supervisor, farm foreman, unit manager, herd manager, orchard manager, estate manager, production manager. They are separate searches and often separate pay levels.
• Say whether you need a house with the job, whether you will relocate, and whether you can be on call during calving, harvest or bad weather. These practical facts speed up an offer.
• Keep formatting plain. Many farm jobs are advertised through agricultural recruiters, land agents, farming press job pages and family farms that will print the file or paste it into an application.
• In the US this document is a resume, and acres replace hectares and bushels replace tonnes. If you are applying in the States, convert the units and follow US conventions.