Farm machinery

The sixteenth entry is la modulation intraparcellaire, and the noun at the front of it is doing ordinary work in French that « modulation » cannot do in English. For an English reader the word belongs to three narrow places: a change of key in music, a rise and fall in a speaking voice, and a carrier wave in radio. Nothing in any of them suggests fertiliser. Moduler, in French, simply means to vary a quantity by degrees instead of applying one figure everywhere, and the verb is at home in departments that have never met a sound wave. Moduler les aides is to scale a subsidy to the case; moduler une peine is to fit a sentence to the offender; moduler ses horaires is to stagger working hours; un tarif modulé changes with the season. So the entry says something unremarkable in its own language: the rate is varied inside the field rather than held flat across it. Write « intra-field modulation » in a report and a radio engineer walks in; the term of art is « variable rate application ».