Agriculture Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
94 free Agriculture trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Farming fed the first cities, and it still decides what lands on your plate. Humans were gathering grain 105,000 years ago, planting it 11,500 years ago, and within a few thousand more had domesticated sheep, goats, pigs and cattle. This trivia about agriculture covers that whole arc: the Fertile Crescent and the Neolithic Revolution, Jethro Tull's seed drill and the British Agricultural Revolution, John Deere's steel plough, Norman Borlaug's dwarf wheat, the Haber process, the Dust Bowl, and the crops that feed the world today. Every answer is sourced and explained.
30 of 94 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Early farming created food surpluses; what did those surpluses let people do?
Live in cities
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.
Q 02Besides Asia, which region independently domesticated its own species of rice?
West Africa
West Africa's farmers grew African rice, a separate species, but introduced Asian rice is now replacing it.
Q 03About what share of the world's food do small family farms produce?
33%
33%, about a third of the world's food, comes from small family farms, even though large farms dominate total farmland.
Q 04About what share of the world's food is lost after harvest but before reaching shops?
13%
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.
Q 05The shift from hunting and gathering to farming and settlement is known as what?
The Neolithic Revolution
The Neolithic Revolution set off a population boom, as a steadier food supply and settled living pushed birth rates up.
Q 06Which Middle Eastern region is believed to be where settled farming first emerged?
The Fertile Crescent
The Fertile Crescent had fertile soil near its rivers, which let farming take hold, and later irrigation works spread that fertility further.
Q 07Which Roman god of agriculture and seed-corn gave his name to a planet?
Saturn
Saturn was honoured each December with the Saturnalia, one of the liveliest festivals in the Roman calendar, a time of feasting.
Q 08Irrigation from the 6th millennium BCE has been found in Khuzistan, in which modern country?
Iran
By 2000 about 2.79 million square kilometres of farmland had irrigation infrastructure, with roughly 68 percent of it in Asia.
Q 09What were the chinampas the Aztecs built in the shallow lakes around their capital?
Artificial islands
Artificial islands nicknamed 'floating gardens', chinampas were built by weaving reeds between stakes and piling in soil until it rose above the water.
Q 10Asian rice was first domesticated about 9,000 years ago along which river?
The Yangtze
The Yangtze's early farmers favoured rice whose grains stay on the stalk instead of shattering, the key genetic sign of a domesticated grain.
Q 11The potato is a nightshade; which common food crop belongs to its same genus?
Tomato
Tomato plants share the genus Solanum with potatoes, and potato plants even grow small green fruits that look like cherry tomatoes.
Q 12Maize is the domesticated form of which wild grasses?
Teosintes
Teosintes look little like maize, yet they can still cross with it to form hybrids that go on to reproduce.
Q 13Barbara McClintock used maize to prove which theory, winning a 1983 Nobel Prize?
Jumping genes
Jumping genes explained the speckled colours McClintock saw in maize kernels, which changed as pieces of chromosome moved around.
Q 21Which fungal blight threatens the Cavendish bananas that dominate the global market?
Panama disease
Panama disease nearly wiped out the Gros Michel, then the dominant banana, in the 1950s, forcing growers to switch to resistant varieties.
Q 22Crop rotation mainly guards against the problems caused by what practice?
Monocropping
Monocropping gradually drains particular nutrients from the soil and lets specialised pests and weeds build up, which rotating crops breaks.
Q 23Which Briton popularised the four-course rotation of wheat, turnips, barley and clover?
Charles Townshend
Charles Townshend retired from political life in 1730 and devoted himself to farming his Raynham estate in Norfolk.
Q 14Roughly how many tonnes of wheat does the world harvest each year?
800 million tonnes
800 million tonnes is about the yearly harvest, and wheat's gluten holds gas bubbles in dough, which lets bread rise.
Q 15Commercial dry pasta is made almost entirely from the semolina of which wheat?
Durum
Durum semolina's high protein and gluten make it especially suitable for pasta, which is why durum is nicknamed pasta wheat.
Q 16What is the world's largest crop by production quantity?
Sugarcane
Sugarcane was first domesticated by Papuans in New Guinea, one of two places where people separately tamed the giant grass.
Q 17Which explorer's second voyage carried a major cash crop to the Caribbean?
Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus's seedlings led to large plantations of the crop, first across the Caribbean and later on the mainland.
Q 18The potato was first domesticated 7,000 to 10,000 years ago around which body of water?
Lake Titicaca
Lake Titicaca lies in the Andes, where farmers freeze-dried potatoes into chuño, a food that could be stored for years.
Q 19In 2020, Brazil and the United States together grew about what share of the world's soybeans?
66%
66% came from the two countries, partly because scientists turned Brazil's infertile Cerrado savannah into highly productive soybean cropland.
Q 20Botanically, a banana is which kind of fruit?
A berry
A berry in the botanical sense is exactly what a banana is, while the strawberry, despite its name, does not qualify.
Q 24In the medieval three-field system, what happened to the third field each year?
It was left fallow
It was left fallow so weeds grew for grazing animals whose manure fertilised the soil, while legumes in another field put nitrogen back.
Q 25Before the seed drill, most seed was planted by which wasteful method?
Hand broadcasting
Hand broadcasting wasted much of the seed, which the drill cut by sowing at set spacing and covering the seed straight away.
Q 26Which English process took away villagers' rights to farm and graze common land?
Enclosure
Enclosure sparked the Midland Revolt of 1607, when protesters pulled up hedges and filled in ditches.
Q 27John Deere was a blacksmith who opened his first shop in 1837 in which Illinois town?
Grand Detour
He had moved from Vermont to escape bankruptcy. The company, now headquartered in Moline, has used a leaping deer logo for over 155 years.
Q 28Which company did Cyrus McCormick's firm help form in 1902?
International Harvester
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.
Q 29Who built and patented the first combine harvester in the United States in 1835?
Hiram Moore
The machine combined several harvest steps into one process. Holt produced a self-propelled harvester in 1911.
Q 30Which three operations did the combine harvester bring together into one machine?
Reaping, threshing and gathering
It is counted among the most economically important labour-saving inventions, sharply cutting the share of people working in agriculture.