50 Fun Facts About Harvest

The English word 'harvest' comes from an Old English word that originally meant what?

In some British dialects it still just means the season, and it only later came to mean the act of gathering crops.

The harvest moon is defined as the full moon closest to what?

The next full moon after it is the hunter's moon; both names are recorded from the early 18th century.

Why does a harvest moon low on the horizon look golden or red?

Light passing through more atmosphere loses its blue and violet, leaving reds and yellows to dominate.

The modern British Harvest Festival is traced to Rev. Robert Hawker's 1843 service in which county?

His idea spread with hymns like 'Come, ye thankful people, come' and the custom of decorating churches with home-grown produce.

Lammas, the early English harvest festival on 1 August, takes its name from what?

Farmers baked loaves from the fresh wheat and gave them to the church as Communion bread.

Which writer's 40-year letter campaign led Lincoln to make Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863?

She is better known as the author of 'Mary Had a Little Lamb'.

Since 1942, US Thanksgiving has been fixed on which day?

Roosevelt had moved it a week earlier in 1939 to lengthen the Christmas shopping season, causing two years of 'double Thanksgiving' chaos.

Canadian Thanksgiving, a harvest thanksgiving by its 1957 proclamation, falls on which day?

The proclamation gives thanks 'for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed'.

Sukkot, the Jewish Feast of Booths, is described in the Torah as a festival of what?

Families eat in a sukkah roofed with plant material, and the Zohar names a different biblical forefather as symbolic guest for each of the seven days.

China's Moon Festival, its great harvest celebration, falls on the 15th day of which lunar month?

Mooncakes filled with lotus-seed or sweet-bean paste are eaten, and offerings go to the moon goddess Chang'e.

Which pastry is traditionally eaten at China's Moon Festival, held around the September equinox?

Lanterns of every shape are carried as beacons lighting the way to prosperity.

Which half-moon rice cakes are eaten at Chuseok, Korea's harvest festival?

In South Korea the holiday lasts three days around the full moon; in North Korea just one.

The Tamil festival Pongal is named after a dish of rice boiled with milk and jaggery until it does what?

On Mattu Pongal cattle are bathed, their horns painted bright colours and garlanded with flowers.

Onam, the harvest festival of Kerala, celebrates the annual return of which legendary king?

Vishnu, as the dwarf Vamana, banished him to the netherworld but let him visit his people once a year.

Vaisakhi marks the birth of the Khalsa, founded by Guru Gobind Singh in which year?

It began as a Hindu grain harvest festival long before Sikhism existed and doubles as the Indian solar New Year.

Homowo, celebrated by the Ga people of Ghana, has a name that literally means what?

It commemorates a famine the Ga endured on their migration and begins with the planting of millet before the rains.

The cornucopia is named in Greek myth after which creature that nursed the infant Zeus?

Amalthea fed the hidden baby god with her milk in a cave on Mount Ida in Crete.

Corn dollies were traditionally woven from the last sheaf of the harvest to give a home to what?

In parts of Germany the last sheaf was dressed as a woman, carried home on the final wagon and drenched with water as a rain charm.

Which Roman goddess of grain and agriculture gave her name to the word 'cereal'?

She was the Roman counterpart of Demeter and had a seven-day April festival with its own games, the Ludi Ceriales.

In Greek mythology, who was the goddess of the harvest and mother of Persephone?

Contrary to the popular telling, her daughter's months in the Underworld do not actually match the barren season of the ancient Greek calendar.

In which wealthy relative's field did Ruth glean at the barley harvest, later marrying him?

Leviticus and Deuteronomy required farmers to leave field edges and dropped grain for the poor and the stranger.

What is the term for collecting leftover crops from a field after the main harvest?

The word entered English in the 14th century already carrying its second meaning, gathering information bit by bit.

Before machines, grain was beaten from the stalk with which two-piece tool?

Pliny the Elder described the alternatives in the first century: threshing boards, or a train of horses trampling the sheaves.

The step after threshing that separates grain from chaff relied on what?

Called winnowing: the heaviest, best grain fell nearest the thrower while the light chaff blew furthest away.

The combine harvester gets its name because it combines reaping, threshing and what third job?

Hiram Moore built and patented the first one in the United States in 1835; early models were pulled by teams of twenty or more horses.

Cyrus McCormick, famous for the reaper, founded a company that became part of which corporation in 1902?

His father had worked on a reaper for 28 years, aided by an enslaved man named Jo Anderson, without producing a reliable one.

Which crop is grown on more land than any other food crop in the world?

It covered 219.5 million hectares in 2024, and world trade in it exceeds all other crops combined, though maize outproduces it by weight.

Wheat was first cultivated around 9600 BC in which region?

World grain production has tripled since 1960.

Rice is the staple food of roughly what share of the world's population?

Asian rice was domesticated in China as long as 13,500 years ago; African rice was tamed separately about 3,000 years ago.

Maize was domesticated about 9,000 years ago in southern Mexico from which wild grass?

Barbara McClintock won a Nobel Prize in 1983 for discovering 'jumping genes' in maize.

Which US state grows about 95% of the pumpkins destined for processing into canned pie filling?

The heaviest pumpkin on record, set in October 2023, weighed 1,246.9 kg.

Cranberry beds are flooded at harvest time for what reason?

Beds are not underwater all year, despite the popular image; they are flooded again in winter as frost protection.

Which US state produced 59% of the American cranberry crop in 2021?

New England had 21,500 acres under cranberries by 1900, but the Midwest overtook it.

Norman Borlaug, 'father of the Green Revolution', won which honour in 1970 for his high-yield wheat?

He is credited with saving over a billion people from starvation, and is one of only seven people to also hold the Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal.

An AP editor coined 'Dust Bowl' after 'Black Sunday', a black blizzard that hit the Plains on 14 April of which year?

The drought came in three waves, in 1934, 1936 and 1939-40, on land ploughed up after the Homestead Act.

In which port city was the first steam-powered grain elevator built in 1842–43?

Joseph Dart and Robert Dunbar's 'marine leg' scooped loose grain straight out of ships' hulls.

Which communal farm-building tradition survives largely unchanged among the Amish and Old Order Mennonites?

In the 18th and 19th centuries a barn was too big and costly for one family to build alone, so the neighbourhood turned out.

In which modern country was the oldest evidence of bread-making, about 14,500 years old, found?

Even older starch residues, 30,000 years old, on grinding stones in Europe and Australia hint at primitive root flatbreads.

A sickle differs from a scythe mainly in that it is designed to be used how?

The Latin synonym falx later came to mean almost any tool with an inward-sharpened curved blade.

Which 1600 Thomas Nashe play preserves the custom of a harvest 'lord' riding the final laden cart?

The reapers shouted 'Hooky, hooky' as the final wagon came in and the 'lord' begged money from onlookers.

Who built and patented the first combine harvester, in 1835?

Early combines were hauled by mule or horse teams, sometimes twenty or more animals, and used a bullwheel for power before steam arrived.

Which company introduced the first rotary combines, in 1975?

A rotary machine strips grain along a helical rotor instead of between rasp bars and a concave. Massey-Harris had perfected the self-propelled combine back in 1937.

Which track from Neil Young's 1972 album Harvest became his only US number-one single?

Young said the song's composition was influenced by the French tune 'Love Is Blue'. The album featured the London Symphony Orchestra on two tracks.

Which song on Neil Young's Harvest drew a famous 1973 reply record from Lynyrd Skynyrd?

Young later wrote that the song 'richly deserved the shot' Skynyrd gave him, calling it an unblushing rehash of his earlier 'Southern Man'.

Cyrus McCormick first demonstrated his reaper in 1831 at Steeles Tavern, in which state?

He was helped by Jo Anderson, an enslaved man on the McCormick plantation. Despite a patent in 1834, he did not sell a single reaper until 1840.

At the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition, McCormick's reaper beat whose rival machine?

McCormick won a gold medal and the Legion of Honour, then promptly learned he had lost a court challenge to Hussey's patent back home.

The 1678 crop-circle pamphlet The Mowing-Devil reported strange news from which county?

The pamphlet described stalks that were cut rather than bent. In 1991 pranksters Doug Bower and Dave Chorley admitted to making over 200 modern circles.

Which Japanese village on Shikoku has about 35 residents but more than 350 scarecrows?

The life-size figures sit at bus stops and in classrooms. The Philippine province of Isabela launched its own scarecrow festival, Bambanti, in 2015.

Which West African country celebrates Thanksgiving on the first Thursday of November?

Its legislature made the day a national holiday in 1883; the country was founded in 1821 as a colony for freed African Americans.

Which Australian territory marks Thanksgiving on the last Wednesday of November?

The timing mirrors the pre-war American custom of the last Thursday; with the time difference, the island celebrates two days before or five days after the US.