94 Fun Facts About Agriculture

Early farming created food surpluses; what did those surpluses let people do?

Live in cities is what the surpluses allowed, even though people had gathered wild grain for over 100,000 years before they began planting it.

Besides Asia, which region independently domesticated its own species of rice?

West Africa's farmers grew African rice, a separate species, but introduced Asian rice is now replacing it.

About what share of the world's food do small family farms produce?

33%, about a third of the world's food, comes from small family farms, even though large farms dominate total farmland.

About what share of the world's food is lost after harvest but before reaching shops?

13% of food is lost this way, and the share has hardly changed since the mid-2010s despite a UN target to cut such losses.

The shift from hunting and gathering to farming and settlement is known as what?

The Neolithic Revolution set off a population boom, as a steadier food supply and settled living pushed birth rates up.

Which Middle Eastern region is believed to be where settled farming first emerged?

The Fertile Crescent had fertile soil near its rivers, which let farming take hold, and later irrigation works spread that fertility further.

Which Roman god of agriculture and seed-corn gave his name to a planet?

Saturn was honoured each December with the Saturnalia, one of the liveliest festivals in the Roman calendar, a time of feasting.

Irrigation from the 6th millennium BCE has been found in Khuzistan, in which modern country?

By 2000 about 2.79 million square kilometres of farmland had irrigation infrastructure, with roughly 68 percent of it in Asia.

What were the chinampas the Aztecs built in the shallow lakes around their capital?

Artificial islands nicknamed 'floating gardens', chinampas were built by weaving reeds between stakes and piling in soil until it rose above the water.

Asian rice was first domesticated about 9,000 years ago along which river?

The Yangtze's early farmers favoured rice whose grains stay on the stalk instead of shattering, the key genetic sign of a domesticated grain.

The potato is a nightshade; which common food crop belongs to its same genus?

Tomato plants share the genus Solanum with potatoes, and potato plants even grow small green fruits that look like cherry tomatoes.

Maize is the domesticated form of which wild grasses?

Teosintes look little like maize, yet they can still cross with it to form hybrids that go on to reproduce.

Barbara McClintock used maize to prove which theory, winning a 1983 Nobel Prize?

Jumping genes explained the speckled colours McClintock saw in maize kernels, which changed as pieces of chromosome moved around.

Roughly how many tonnes of wheat does the world harvest each year?

800 million tonnes is about the yearly harvest, and wheat's gluten holds gas bubbles in dough, which lets bread rise.

Commercial dry pasta is made almost entirely from the semolina of which wheat?

Durum semolina's high protein and gluten make it especially suitable for pasta, which is why durum is nicknamed pasta wheat.

What is the world's largest crop by production quantity?

Sugarcane was first domesticated by Papuans in New Guinea, one of two places where people separately tamed the giant grass.

Which explorer's second voyage carried a major cash crop to the Caribbean?

Christopher Columbus's seedlings led to large plantations of the crop, first across the Caribbean and later on the mainland.

The potato was first domesticated 7,000 to 10,000 years ago around which body of water?

Lake Titicaca lies in the Andes, where farmers freeze-dried potatoes into chuño, a food that could be stored for years.

In 2020, Brazil and the United States together grew about what share of the world's soybeans?

66% came from the two countries, partly because scientists turned Brazil's infertile Cerrado savannah into highly productive soybean cropland.

Botanically, a banana is which kind of fruit?

A berry in the botanical sense is exactly what a banana is, while the strawberry, despite its name, does not qualify.

Which fungal blight threatens the Cavendish bananas that dominate the global market?

Panama disease nearly wiped out the Gros Michel, then the dominant banana, in the 1950s, forcing growers to switch to resistant varieties.

Crop rotation mainly guards against the problems caused by what practice?

Monocropping gradually drains particular nutrients from the soil and lets specialised pests and weeds build up, which rotating crops breaks.

Which Briton popularised the four-course rotation of wheat, turnips, barley and clover?

Charles Townshend retired from political life in 1730 and devoted himself to farming his Raynham estate in Norfolk.

In the medieval three-field system, what happened to the third field each year?

It was left fallow so weeds grew for grazing animals whose manure fertilised the soil, while legumes in another field put nitrogen back.

Before the seed drill, most seed was planted by which wasteful method?

Hand broadcasting wasted much of the seed, which the drill cut by sowing at set spacing and covering the seed straight away.

Which English process took away villagers' rights to farm and graze common land?

Enclosure sparked the Midland Revolt of 1607, when protesters pulled up hedges and filled in ditches.

John Deere was a blacksmith who opened his first shop in 1837 in which Illinois town?

He had moved from Vermont to escape bankruptcy. The company, now headquartered in Moline, has used a leaping deer logo for over 155 years.

Which company did Cyrus McCormick's firm help form in 1902?

International Harvester was created when McCormick's son teamed with banker J. P. Morgan to merge the family firm with Deering and three smaller makers.

Who built and patented the first combine harvester in the United States in 1835?

The machine combined several harvest steps into one process. Holt produced a self-propelled harvester in 1911.

Which three operations did the combine harvester bring together into one machine?

It is counted among the most economically important labour-saving inventions, sharply cutting the share of people working in agriculture.

John Froelich built a gasoline-powered tractor in 1892 in which US state?

John Charter had combined Otto engines with a steam-engine chassis in Illinois in 1889. The word tractor comes from the Latin trahere, to pull.

Harry Ferguson patented which tractor innovation in Britain in 1926?

The three-point hitch transfers an implement's weight onto the tractor's drive wheels, so tractor and implement work as a single unit.

Eli Whitney's cotton gin, created in 1793, did what to cotton?

Separated fibres from seeds so fast that picking became the bottleneck, so plantations needed far more workers to harvest the crop.

The Haber process converts atmospheric nitrogen into what?

Ammonia from the Haber process enabled mass production of fertilisers, which led to a huge increase in the crops grown for people to eat.

The Haber process was first run on an industrial scale in 1913 at whose Oppau plant?

BASF's process kept Germany supplied with munitions in World War I, after a British naval blockade cut off its nitrates from Chile.

Who is often called the father of the Green Revolution?

Norman Borlaug went on to create the World Food Prize in 1986, an award for people who improve the quality, quantity or availability of food.

In which country was the Green Revolution's semi-dwarf, high-yield wheat developed?

Mexico became self-sufficient in wheat under the programme, and the dwarf wheat was then introduced into India and Pakistan.

Which Nobel Prize was the father of the Green Revolution awarded in 1970?

Peace was the prize, awarded 'for having given a well-founded hope', the Green Revolution, to countries struggling to grow enough food.

The Green Revolution's high-yielding seeds required far more of what than older varieties?

Chemical inputs such as fertiliser swelled grain heads, so the new varieties had short, sturdy stems that would not topple under the weight like taller wheats.

Deep ploughing before the Dust Bowl removed what, which had held the Plains' soil?

Native grasses were ploughed up for wheat, so when drought came, the bare soil blew away in huge dust storms.

The devastating dust storm of 14 April 1935 became known by what name?

Black Sunday's storm was witnessed by reporter Robert E. Geiger, whose account named the stricken region 'the Dust Bowl'.

Which John Steinbeck novel of 1939 is among the best-known works about the Dust Bowl?

The Grapes of Wrath won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, yet after publication it was also publicly banned and burned by some citizens.

Hydroponics grows plants without soil using what instead?

Roots may float free or be supported by inert media like perlite or gravel. A 1938 bulletin by Hoagland and Arnon became a classic of the field.

The first powered farm implements in the early 19th century were what?

Portable steam engines on wheels could not move themselves, so horses or oxen towed them to farms, where a belt drove machines such as threshers.

Which farm animal was Dolly, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, at Scotland's Roslin Institute?

A sheep, and one with a cheeky name: Dolly was cloned from a mammary gland cell, so the team named her after the singer Dolly Parton.

Vanilla, the world's second-most expensive spice by weight, comes from the seed pods of which family of flowers?

Orchids of the genus Vanilla are pollinated by hand, a method discovered in 1841 by Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old boy held in slavery on the island of Réunion.

Which Italian supercar maker's founder began in 1948 by building tractors from discarded war materials?

Lamborghini Trattori came first: Ferruccio Lamborghini fitted truck and military vehicle engines into his early Carioca tractors, and only later set up the sports car company.

Which flightless bird beat soldiers with machine guns sent to protect Western Australian wheat farms in 1932?

Emus proved hard targets: when settlers tried to herd them into an ambush, the birds split into small groups and ran from the army's two Lewis guns.

Which naturalist devoted his last scientific book to the way earthworms slowly build and turn over the soil?

Charles Darwin had been watching worms for decades: he first read a paper on earthworms and soil formation to the Geological Society of London in 1837.

Broccoli, cauliflower, kale and Brussels sprouts were all bred from which single plant of Europe's sea cliffs?

Wild cabbage, Brassica oleracea, is also the parent of kohlrabi, collards, Savoy cabbage and gai lan, which growers sort into groups by the form each plant takes.

Which crop pest is honoured with a monument in Enterprise, Alabama, for pushing farmers to diversify?

Boll weevil damage convinced the town that it had leaned too hard on one crop, so in 1919 its citizens put up a monument to the insect that had wrecked their cotton.

Which country keeps a backup of the world's crop seeds inside a sandstone mountain on an Arctic island?

Norway paid the whole construction bill of about 45 million kroner for the Svalbard vault, which sits 130 metres inside a mountain on the island of Spitsbergen.

Which bird did Mao Zedong's Four Pests campaign try to wipe out alongside rats, flies and mosquitoes?

Sparrow numbers crashed and the ecological balance went with them, so in 1960 the campaign dropped the birds and named bed bugs as its fourth pest instead.

Which fencing invention did Illinois farmer Joseph Glidden patent in its modern form in 1874?

Barbed wire was cheaper and easier to put up than one alternative of the day, a hedge of thorny Osage orange that was slow to transplant and grow.

Which country leads the world in producing both cattle milk and buffalo milk, and drinks more than any other?

India is the world's largest milk producer, yet demand at home is rising so fast that the country could one day become a net importer of dairy.

Saffron, the costly spice made of dried crimson stigmas, is hand-picked from which autumn-blooming flower?

Crocus flowers give so little that about 150,000 of them go into a single kilogram of saffron, which works out at some 440,000 stigmas picked by hand.

Which crop did George Washington Carver famously urge Southern farmers to grow instead of cotton?

Peanut milk, flour and dyes were among the samples he showed Congress in 1921, when his testimony for a tariff on imported peanuts made him a national figure.

Which African country grows more cocoa beans than any other, well ahead of its neighbour Ghana?

Ivory Coast and Ghana between them produce well over half of the world's cocoa, and more than 70% of the global cacao crop is grown in Africa.

Cashmere, a fibre named after the shawls of Kashmir, comes from the soft undercoat of which animal?

Goat hair is sorted into two grades: the soft undercoat is kept for textiles, while the coarse guard hairs end up in brushes.

Which European country's population fell by a fifth or more after blight destroyed its staple crop in the 1840s?

Ireland lost roughly a million people to the famine and at least a million more to emigration after the blight ruined its potato harvests.

Gregor Mendel worked out the basic rules of heredity by breeding some 28,000 plants, mostly of which garden crop?

Pea plants suited the work because traits such as seed shape, pod shape and plant height seemed to pass down independently, and he settled on tracking seven of them.

Which amphibian, shipped from Hawaii to Queensland in 1935 to eat crop beetles, became a notorious invasive pest?

Cane toad releases were meant to control beetles whose larvae ate sugar crops, a job the animals had been doing in Puerto Rico since 1920.

What collective name do Native American farmers give the companion planting of maize, climbing beans and squash?

Three Sisters planting makes each crop work for the others: the cornstalk is a trellis for the beans, the beans fix nitrogen, and broad squash leaves shade out weeds.

Which US president founded the Department of Agriculture and nicknamed it the people's department?

Abraham Lincoln set it up in 1862, at a time when more than half the nation made its living directly or indirectly from farming.

Which Rachel Carson book turned public opinion against farm pesticides and led to a US ban on DDT?

Silent Spring began with a friend's letter about birds dying around her Massachusetts home after DDT was sprayed from the air to kill mosquitoes.

Which cash crop did John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, first grow successfully for export in colonial Virginia?

Tobacco began to pay in Virginia once he introduced a sweeter strain from Trinidad, and the leaf he planted became the base of the colony's economy.

Which country has reclaimed as much as a fifth of its land from the sea, creating farmland called polders?

The Netherlands has been draining land for centuries: its first polders date from the 11th century, and the Flevopolder was still being reclaimed in the 1960s.

Which Southeast Asian country produces more than half of the world's palm oil, ahead of neighbouring Malaysia?

Indonesia turned out about 60% of the world's palm oil in 2022, and it burns part of the harvest as fuel, making its biodiesel mainly from the crop.

Which Central Asian lake began shrinking in the 1960s after Soviet planners diverted its rivers to irrigate cotton?

Aral Sea water was traded for what Soviet planners called white gold: the Amu Darya and Syr Darya were turned onto desert fields of cotton, melons and rice.

Which unit of land was traditionally the area one man could plough in a day with a team of eight oxen?

Acre strips were laid out long and thin, forty perches by four, or 660 feet by 66, which still gives the modern figure of 43,560 square feet.

Which cattle breed, famed for its high milk yield, is the world's most widespread dairy cow?

Holstein cows around the world are said to be mostly related to one star bull, Hanoverhill Starbuck, whose semen brought in almost $25 million in sales.

Which Andean seed crop is a pseudocereal, botanically closer to spinach than to wheat or rice?

Quinoa spread fast once the wider world noticed it: prices tripled between 2006 and 2013, by which time it was being grown in some 70 countries.

Which American youth organisation began in 1902 to teach rural children better farming and homemaking methods?

4-H is named for the four qualities it set out to build in the young, Head, Heart, Hands and Health, and one of its first clubs met in Clark County, Ohio.

Which tree's leaves, above all those of its white species, are the preferred food of farmed silkworms?

Mulberry leaves draw the larvae by smell: silkworms are attracted to an odorant in the leaf called cis-jasmone, though they will eat other plants if they must.

Which root crop became Europe's home-grown sugar source when a British blockade cut imports in the Napoleonic wars?

Beet sugar was first isolated in Berlin in 1747 by Andreas Marggraf, and his student Franz Karl Achard began breeding sweeter roots nearby in 1786.

Which fertiliser, gathered from seabird colonies on islands off Peru, became a prized European import in the 1800s?

Guano takes its name from a Quechua word for any dung used on the fields, and Andean people may have been collecting it from the coast for as long as 5,000 years.

Which American company, bought by Bayer in 2018, patented glyphosate as a weedkiller and sold it as Roundup?

Monsanto patented the herbicidal use of glyphosate in 1971, and by 2009 the Roundup line was bringing in about half of the company's yearly revenue.

Which tropical root crop must be carefully prepared because badly processed roots can cause cyanide poisoning?

Cassava is mostly eaten boiled, but a large share is turned into the starch called tapioca, which goes into food, animal feed and industrial products.

On a bag of NPK fertiliser, the K stands for which nutrient, first isolated from the ashes of plants?

Potassium is stripped from the soil quickly by heavy cropping, which is why fertiliser accounts for about 95% of the world's production of potassium chemicals.

Which crop is grown both for linseed oil and for the fibre that is woven into linen?

Flax is cultivated as both a food and a fibre crop in temperate climates, and its cloth was the traditional choice for bed sheets and underclothes.

Which oilseed crop did Canadian researchers rebreed in the mid-1970s into the edible varieties sold as canola?

Rapeseed oil counts as canola only when it is low in erucic acid: the edible varieties must contain less than 2% in Canada, the United States and the European Union.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, founded in 1945, has its headquarters in which European city?

Rome was already the home of its forerunner, the International Institute of Agriculture, created after a 1905 conference by King Victor Emmanuel III.

Which cereal did Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary define as horse feed in England but food for people in Scotland?

Oats were long grown and eaten above all in Scotland, as porridge and oatcakes, and they are still fed to horses that need a boost of energy.

Which is the largest compartment of a cow's stomach, where microbes ferment fibre the animal cannot digest alone?

The rumen is also known as the paunch, and each of its sacs holds its own community of microbes turning roughage into usable energy and fatty acids.

What name, a contraction of the Russian for collective farm, did the Soviet Union give its farming cooperatives?

Kolkhoz farms were legally organised as production cooperatives, and they existed side by side with the sovkhoz, a farm run by the state.

Which red dye, still used to colour food and lipstick, is made from scale insects that live on prickly pear cacti?

Cochineal insects are brushed off the cactus pads and dried, and the carminic acid that gives the colour makes up around a fifth of their dried weight.

Triticale, a hybrid cereal grown mainly in Poland and Germany, is a cross between wheat and which other grain?

Rye pollen was first used to fertilise wheat flowers by the Scottish botanist Alexander Wilson in the 1870s, but his plants were sterile. Today's triticale pairs wheat's yield with rye's hardiness.

Which insect from North America devastated over 40% of French vineyards between the late 1850s and the mid-1870s?

Phylloxera was beaten by grafting: from 1871 French growers imported resistant American vines and joined their own varieties onto the foreign rootstock.

Which cattle disease was declared eradicated in 2011, making it only the second disease wiped out after smallpox?

Rinderpest took decades of worldwide campaigning to beat: the last confirmed case was diagnosed in 2001, ten years before the formal declaration.

Which wild ancestor of domestic cattle, painted on the cave walls of Lascaux, died out in Poland in 1627?

Aurochs bulls were fierce even with each other: evidence from Jaktorów forest, where the last one died, shows rutting males could wound a rival fatally.

Which breed of laying hen, widely used on commercial egg farms, takes its name from the Italian port of Livorno?

Leghorn is the traditional English name for Livorno, the Tuscan port that shipped the first birds to North America, where they were at first simply known as Italians.

Which Soviet agronomist rejected Mendelian genetics and used his political power to have rival scientists imprisoned?

Trofim Lysenko made his anti-Mendelian ideas state doctrine after taking over the Institute of Genetics in 1940, and critics such as the botanist Nikolai Vavilov were jailed.

Which English research station, founded in 1843, has planted its Broadbalk field with winter wheat every year since?

Rothamsted is one of the oldest agricultural research institutions in the world, and its Park Grass plots have been monitored without a break since 1856.

Which Mediterranean country is the world's largest producer of olive oil?

Spain made about a quarter of the world's olive oil in 2022, a year when global production came to 2.7 million tonnes.