Farm Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
212 free Farm trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
57 free Farm trivia questions with answers. Farm trivia is a favourite for classrooms, county fairs and family quiz nights, and this set is built for all three. Fifty questions cover the animals (why cows chew the cud, what a mule's parents are, which bird has a snood), the crops (where corn and potatoes were first grown, which grain feeds half the world), and the machines and inventors that changed farming, from Eli Whitney's cotton gin to Norman Borlaug's dwarf wheat. Around a third of the questions are easy enough for an eight-year-old: what a baby goat is called, what a scarecrow is for, what animal gives us wool. The rest climb through farm history, dairy science, honeybees, Charlotte's Web and Animal Farm to a few genuinely tough ones for people who grew up on one. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the animals, crops, inventions and books involved, and each question shows the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 212 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A baby goat is called what?
A kid
A kid was a young goat long before it was a child: English took the word from Old Norse around 1200, and only in the 1590s did it turn up as slang for a youngster.
Q 02Which waxy grease, washed out of freshly shorn wool, is a staple of skin creams and ointments?
Lanolin
Lanolin is the wax sheep secrete to keep rain out of their fleece; scouring the shorn wool washes it out, and its name simply joins the Latin words for wool and oil.
Q 03A cow's stomach has how many compartments?
Four
A cow's stomach has four compartments: rumen, reticulum, omasum and abomasum. The rumen hosts the microbes that break down grass, and cattle re-chew regurgitated cud.
Q 04An adult female sheep is called what?
A ewe
A ewe knows her own lamb by its smell, so a shepherd who wants her to adopt an orphan first rubs it with the scent of her own newborn.
Q 05Pigs roll in mud mainly to do what?
Cool down
Pigs cool down by wallowing because they cannot sweat to shed heat and pant poorly, so water evaporating from a coat of mud does the job instead; the mud may also guard their skin against sunburn.
Q 06The domestic chicken descends from which wild bird of Southeast Asia?
Red junglefowl
The domestic chicken descends from the red junglefowl (Gallus gallus) of Southeast Asia; the grey junglefowl later contributed the yellow-skin gene seen in some breeds.
Q 07A modern hen bred for egg laying produces roughly how many eggs a year?
About 300
About 300 eggs a year is routine for a commercial laying hen: left alone, a hen stops when her clutch is complete and sits on it, but layers were bred to lose that broody urge and keep laying.
Q 08Chickens with red earlobes generally lay eggs of what colour?
Brown
Red-earlobed breeds generally lay brown eggs and white-earlobed breeds lay white ones, though there is no nutritional difference between the two.
Q 09A young horse that is still nursing from its mother is sometimes called what?
A suckling
A suckling becomes a weanling once it leaves its mother's milk; born to a prey animal, a foal can run beside her within a few hours, because a herd on the move cannot wait.
Q 10Horses can doze on their feet, but what must they do to reach deep REM sleep?
Lie down
Lie down is the only way: a 'stay apparatus' of tendons locks a dozing horse's legs, but REM sleep relaxes every muscle, so a horse kept standing for days can collapse mid-doze.
Q 11A mule is the offspring of a male donkey and what?
A female horse
A mule is the offspring of a male donkey (jack) and a female horse (mare); mules are almost always sterile because horse and donkey chromosome counts differ, 64 against 62.
Q 12Most domestic ducks descend from which wild species?
Mallard
The mallard is the ancestor of nearly every farm duck, and the two remain one species: escaped domestic ducks breed freely with wild mallards and their young are fully fertile.
Q 13On a turkey, which fleshy growth that droops over the beak shares its name with a hair net?
The snood
The snood is the fleshy flap above a turkey's beak that lengthens and reddens when a male displays; the wattle is the growth hanging beneath the beak.
Q 21Domestic cattle descend from which huge wild ox that once ranged across Europe and Asia?
The aurochs
The aurochs was first tamed in south-west Asia more than ten thousand years ago and outlived that by millennia, until hunting and lost habitat finished it: the last one died in Poland in 1627.
Q 22Maize (corn) was first domesticated about 9,000 years ago in which modern country?
Mexico
Maize was domesticated in the Balsas River valley of southern Mexico about 9,000 years ago from a wild grass called teosinte, whose tiny hard kernels look nothing like a modern cob.
Q 23Which crop is the staple food of about half the world's people?
Rice
Rice feeds about half of humanity, and unlike other grains most of it grows standing in water: seedlings are moved into paddies kept a few centimetres deep until shortly before harvest.
Q 14Baby turkeys are called what?
Poults
Baby turkeys are poults; turkeys were domesticated in central Mexico and reached Europe with the Spanish in the 16th century.
Q 15Alpacas were traditionally herded in the mountains of which continent?
South America
Alpacas come from the high plateaus of South America and exist only as a farm animal: herders there bred them from the wild vicuña thousands of years ago, selecting for fleece.
Q 16The Holstein Friesian is the dominant breed in which kind of farming?
Dairy
The Holstein Friesian comes from the North Sea grasslands of Holland and Friesland, where dairy farmers are believed to have spent some 2,000 years selecting the cows that turned the most grass into milk.
Q 17The shaggy, long-horned Highland breed of cattle comes from which country?
Scotland
Scotland's Highland cattle wear a double coat, long oily outer hair over a downy underlayer, which is why they thrive on rough grazing in cold, wet hill weather.
Q 18The Border Collie was bred mainly to do what job?
Herd sheep
Border Collies herd sheep with 'the eye', a fixed, intimidating stare that moves a flock without a bite and may be a leftover of the wolf's stalk; the breed took shape on the Anglo-Scottish border.
Q 19Which kingdom guarded its fine-woolled Merino sheep as a monopoly for centuries, banning their export?
Spain
Spain made taking a Merino out of the country a capital crime until the 1700s, when its kings began sending flocks to other courts as gifts; from those descend the sheep of Australia's wool trade.
Q 20Which animal was the first to be domesticated by humans?
The dog
The dog was tamed from wolves by hunter-gatherers thousands of years before anyone farmed, which makes it the one farmyard animal older than the farm.
Q 24The potato was first domesticated in which region?
The Andes
The Andes gave the world the potato, and farmers there also learned to freeze-dry it: tubers left out on freezing nights and trampled underfoot become chuño, which keeps for years.
Q 25Wheat was first cultivated around 9600 BC in which region?
The Fertile Crescent
In the Fertile Crescent wild wheat shattered when ripe and scattered its grain; each harvest favoured the rare ears that held on, so without meaning to, farmers bred a wheat that waits to be gathered.
Q 26The soybean is the world's most widely grown example of what kind of plant?
Legume
The soybean is a legume, and like its relatives it hosts bacteria in its roots that take nitrogen from the air, so the crop feeds the soil it grows in.
Q 27Cotton fibre grows inside a protective case around the seeds called what?
A boll
A boll is also where the boll weevil lays its eggs; the beetle wrecked so many crops that Enterprise, Alabama, raised a monument to it in 1919 for forcing farmers to try peanuts.
Q 28Who invented the modern cotton gin in 1793?
Eli Whitney
Eli Whitney built his cotton gin in 1793 and patented it in 1794; it made short-staple cotton profitable, with grim consequences for the expansion of slavery.
Q 29John Deere made his name in 1837 by inventing the first commercially successful what?
Steel plough
John Deere, a Vermont blacksmith who moved to Illinois, made a polished steel plough in 1837 that shed the sticky prairie soil which clogged cast-iron ploughs.
Q 30Cyrus McCormick is credited as the inventor of which farm machine?
The mechanical reaper
The mechanical reaper he first showed in Virginia in 1831 sold slowly at first; in 1847 McCormick moved to Chicago to build it close to the prairie grain fields and the new railways, and there it made his fortune.