Agriculture Slang, Jargon, and New Words from Double-Tongued Dictionary

Citations in the Category Agriculture

Farming, gardening, planting, crops, ranching, animal management, animal husbandry, horticulture, agronomy, breeding, etc. You can also see entries assigned to this category.

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acoustic ranching n. Researchers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole hope to prove fish can be trained to associate certain sounds with feeding, by putting thousands of black sea bass in a dome-shaped structure at the bottom of Buzzards Bay, and feeding them pellets after playing a tone underwater. After they are released to supplement their diet with natural forage, the hope is they will return to the dome for recapture. “Basically the whole concept is: What if you can go out in the ocean and call only the fish you want into the net?”…The process is called “acoustic ranching,” Miner said, and is basically akin to Ivan Pavlov’s dogs, except underwater and with fish. [English Agriculture] [full cite] (Mar. 7, 2008)

agflation n. Look, we’ve already seen in the investment world the term “agflation” has now been coined, and that’s simply a result of this, and that inflationary impact of higher grains prices or higher agricultural commodities prices that will be inflationary, will push food prices up. [English Agriculture Money & Finance] [full cite] (Jun. 20, 2007)

backing heads n. Her most recent job was “backing heads,” scraping meat from between the vertebrae. [English Agriculture Jargon] [full cite] (Feb. 6, 2008)

battery cage n. There are some 19 million egg-laying hens raised in the state, and Shapiro said more than 90 percent are raised in what are called “battery cages.” The cages are lined up in long rows and on average hold six birds. [English Agriculture] [full cite] (Mar. 4, 2008)

battery cage n. Proposition 2, co-sponsored by the Humane Society and Farm Sanctuary, the biggest farm-animal-rights group in the United States, focuses on what are considered the worst animal-confinement systems in factory farms.…It would eliminate so-called battery cages where four or more hens share a space about the size of a file drawer. [English Agriculture Animals, Insects, & Birds Jargon] [full cite] (Oct. 27, 2008)

black mulch n. Rows of black plastic stretch across the fields of eastern Hillsborough County. The plastic, affectionately called black mulch by farmers, marks where 8,000 acres of strawberry plants will soon blossom. [English Agriculture] [full cite] (Oct. 9, 2006)

blowing brains n. On Nov. 28, Dr. DeVries’s boss, Dr. Ruth Lynfield, the state epidemiologist, toured the plant. She and the owner, Kelly Wadding, paid special attention to the head table. Dr. Lynfield became transfixed by one procedure in particular, called “blowing brains.” As each head reached the end of the table, a worker would insert a metal hose into the foramen magnum, the opening that the spinal cord passes through. High-pressure blasts of compressed air then turned the brain into a slurry that squirted out through the same hole in the skull, often spraying brain tissue around and splattering the hose operator in the process. The brains were pooled, poured into 10-pound containers and shipped to be sold as food—mostly in China and Korea, where cooks stir-fry them, but also in some parts of the American South, where people like them scrambled up with eggs. [English Agriculture Jargon] [full cite] (Feb. 6, 2008)

breeding pad n. As beef cattle grow and mature, rump fat is an early developing fat tissue. Textbooks of beef cattle anatomy often refer to it as the “breeding pad,” a protective fat Mother Nature put in place for mating, making the process more comfortable for both bull and cow alike. [English Agriculture Animals, Insects, & Birds] [full cite] (Jan. 16, 2008)

brouse n. Hiram said the winter of 1833 was bad for working out so they didn’t get much of the clearing done. They fed the cattle by chopping down brush and saplings for “brouse,” as it was called. [English Agriculture] [full cite] (May. 23, 2008)

brown bagging v. The unauthorized sale of seed from protected crop varieties is prohibited by federal law, warns Steve Sebesta, North Dakota State Seed Department deputy seed commissioner. It’s commonly called “brown bagging” because the seed is packaged in plain, brown bags. [English Agriculture] [full cite] (Apr. 5, 2007)

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