Farming: present and future

Inna | Oct 27, 2025Oct 27, 2025

LESSON OVERVIEW

The main objectives of this lesson are to:

• talk about farming and agriculture from a critical perspective;
• watch a video on AI and farming;
• practise advanced vocabulary for discussing farming.

In this lesson, students think about the origin of meal ingredients, share their experiences with farming and explore farming-related words and phrases (e.g. pivot to, put a strain on, weeding, arable). They talk about modern farming trends and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. Students also watch a video about using AI in farming, chat about farming in their country and discuss the potential consequences of future farming scenarios.

WARM-UP AND VOCABULARY

This lesson starts with a warm-up. Students think about their last meal and say whether they know where the ingredients came from and how they were produced. After that, they look at statements about farming experiences. Students choose three of them that are true about them and give details. Moving on, they use prepositions to complete advanced phrases for discussing farming (e.g. lend itself to, make way for, mitigate the impact). Afterwards, students look at definitions and find words and phrases connected to farming (e.g. irrigation, yield, soil fertility) in the previous task. Following that, they look at the previous statements, pick one and share their opinion. 

VIDEO AND DISCUSSION

In this part of the lesson, students look at types of modern farming trends (e.g. regenerative agriculture, weeding bots, vertical farming) and suggest what they think they might be about. Then, they complete sentences about the trends from the last activity. They think of an advantage or disadvantage of each using the phrases from the lesson. Following that, students engage in discussing farming and answer questions about modern farming trends. They then watch a video about using AI in farming. First, students brainstorm ways AI can help improve agricultural practices. Afterwards, they watch the video and compare their ideas. Next, students talk about points related to farming in their country today and in the future. Moving on, they imagine some farming scenarios (e.g. All fertilisers are banned tomorrow.) and discuss their potential consequences.

HOMEWORK/REVISION

This ESL lesson on can and can’t also includes an additional task that you can use as homework or revision. In the task, students complete and rewrite sentences using the target words and phrases from the lesson. The task is available in the teacher’s version of the worksheet. You can print it and hand it out to your students. It’s also included in the e-lesson plan.

WORKSHEETS

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