Sometimes even Ai can’t quite replicate the strangeness of a job.

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This month work came in the form of one of Farmers Weekly’s biggest events. Transition 2025. Farmers Weekly’s “Transition” is an ongoing initiative—now in its fifth year—designed to help UK farmers navigate the shift to more financially and environmentally sustainable businesses. It brings together practical advice, peer-to-peer learning and expert insight. Sounds simple enough right? Yeah.

At Transition 2024 we ended up with 33 channels of RF all running at the same time in the same field across 3 different staged talks in 3 different marquees. That was headache enough for a day.

For Transition 2025 the good news was that we wouldn’t need 33 channels of RF. The staging of the talks would be slightly different meaning the same 6 channels of RF could be rotated between the different talks throughout the day on each stage.

The complications? Rather than 3 marquees in a field, it was to be three stages, in a barn……with all the attendees in “Silent Disco” headsets so they could listen to whichever of the 3 talks happening simultaneously took their fancy.

How many attendees did we plan to have? 1000!

So. In the middle of May, in the middle of the NIAB facility Northeast of Leeds we had 1000 farmers, all in colour coded LED headphones, listening into some very in depth discussions about where and how farming would be moving forward.

I honestly couldn’t believe the results. I was always comfortable with our ability to make the stages work for the podcast recording element of the day, getting 3 panels of 5 delegates mic’ed and a roving stick mic for audience questions wouldn’t be problem. I wasn’t too concerned either with the link between our mixers and the headsets. We used a system where the headphones had three channels they could receive at any time, with a very natty colour to show them which channel was selected. Three stages, three talks, 3 transmitters, 3 channels, 1000 headsets. Simple. The concern I had was the “buy in” of the attendees. Would they go for it? Would they understand the principle? Would they have the patience to figure out the buttons to tune in to the stage they fancied?

The Answer was a resounding YES. I was staggered. From the first minute our host took them through the outline of the day to the end of the day when attendees left the headsets on the seats it went so smoothly.

The success of the day was as much down to the team on location (Elis Griffiths, Huw Bryant and Matt Hughes) and the tech support from “The Silent Disco Company” (who supplied 1050 headsets and chargers without blinking an eyelid) as the pre-planning.

I am slightly dreading what the gang at Farmers Weekly will come up with next time for Transition 2026!