50 free Agriculture trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Humans gathered grain for ages before farming it. Roughly when did they start planting?
11,500 years ago
Grain gathering goes back at least 105,000 years. Sheep, goats, pigs and cattle were domesticated around 10,000 years ago.
Q 02Plants were independently brought into cultivation in at least how many regions of the world?
Eleven
Farming created the food surpluses that let people live in cities. In the 20th century, large-scale monoculture came to dominate output.
Q 03Small farms of one hectare or less produce roughly what share of the world's food?
One third
Five of every six farms are under 2 hectares, yet farms over 50 hectares, just 1 percent of the total, hold over 70 percent of farmland.
Q 04About what share of the world's food is lost before it even reaches the retail level?
14%
Global production runs to roughly 11 billion tonnes of food, 32 million tonnes of natural fibres and 4 billion cubic metres of wood.
Q 05The shift from hunting and gathering to farming and settlement is known as what?
The Neolithic Revolution
It is also called the First Agricultural Revolution and began in the Holocene about 11,700 years ago, after the last Ice Age.
Q 06Which Middle Eastern region is believed to be where settled farming first emerged?
The Fertile Crescent
Sumer in Mesopotamia flourished there. Irrigation, writing, the wheel and glass all emerged first in the region.
Q 07Which archaeologist popularised the term for that Middle Eastern region in 1914 and 1916?
James Henry Breasted
Historian Thomas Scheffler notes he was following a Western trend of overwriting classical geography with large abstract spaces.
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 09Andean farmers have used terraces called andenes for a thousand years to grow which crops?
Potatoes and maize
The Wari culture developed terraced farming before 1000 AD, and the Inca later added canals, aqueducts and puquios to water dry land.
Q 10Asian rice was first domesticated about 9,000 years ago along which river?
The Yangtze
Rice is the staple food of more than half the world's population. The key domestication marker is a gene for grains that do not shatter.
Q 11Which two countries produced a combined 52% of the world's rice in 2023?
China and India
World output was 800 million tonnes, placing rice third among crops. Around 90 percent is grown in Asia.
Q 12Maize is the domesticated form of which wild grasses?
Teosintes
In 2004 John Doebley pinned the closest wild relative to the Balsas River valley in the southwestern highlands of its homeland.
Q 13Barbara McClintock used maize to prove which theory, winning a 1983 Nobel Prize?
Jumping genes
Her transposon work earned the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Maize is diploid with 20 chromosomes.
Q 21Botanically, a banana is which kind of fruit?
A berry
The plant is a giant herb, not a tree. Bananas are exported in larger volume and value than any other fruit.
Q 22Which fungal blight threatens the Cavendish bananas that dominate the global market?
Panama disease
It is caused by a Fusarium fungus, and black sigatoka adds to the pressure. The Cavendish replaced the earlier Gros Michel variety.
Q 23Crop rotation mainly guards against the problems caused by what practice?
Monocropping
Growing the same crop year after year depletes particular nutrients and breeds specialised pests and weeds.
Q 14Wheat covers more land than any other food crop. What was world production in 2024?
799 million tonnes
That made it the second most-produced cereal after maize. World trade in wheat exceeds that of all other crops combined.
Q 15Which three countries together provided 42% of the world's wheat in 2024?
China, India and Russia
Hunter-gatherers in West Asia harvested wild wheat as early as 21,000 BC, long before it was domesticated.
Q 16What is the world's largest crop by production quantity?
Sugarcane
It totalled 1.9 billion tonnes in 2020, with Brazil growing about 40 percent. Sugarcane supplies 79 percent of the world's sugar.
Q 17Who first brought the world's largest crop to the Caribbean, on his second voyage?
Christopher Columbus
Sugar later formed one side of the colonial triangle trade with European goods and enslaved Africans.
Q 18The potato was first domesticated 7,000 to 10,000 years ago around which body of water?
Lake Titicaca
Wild species range from the southern United States to Chile, but the cultivated potato has a single origin in southern Peru and Bolivia.
Q 19Which country led world potato production in 2024 with 24% of the total?
China
India was the major secondary producer. Centuries of selective breeding have produced more than 5,000 potato varieties.
Q 20Brazil and the United States together grew what share of the world's soybeans in 2020?
66%
Andrew McClung showed in the 1950s that Brazil's Cerrado could grow soybeans with soil amendments, opening a huge new region.
Q 24Which Briton popularised the four-course rotation of wheat, turnips, barley and clover?
Charles Townshend
Including fodder and grazing crops let livestock be bred year-round, a key step in the British Agricultural Revolution.
Q 25In the medieval three-field system, what happened to the third field each year?
It was left fallow
One field took winter wheat or rye, one took nitrogen-fixing legumes like peas and beans, and the resting field fed grazing animals.
Q 26Jethro Tull developed a horse-drawn seed drill in which year?
1701
It sowed seeds economically in neat rows, and he later added a horse-drawn hoe. His methods helped drive the British Agricultural Revolution.
Q 27Before the seed drill, most seed was planted by which wasteful method?
Hand broadcasting
A drill can improve the ratio of seeds harvested to seeds planted by as much as eight times, while saving time and labour.
Q 28In English landownership, what term describes fencing off common land from commoners?
Enclosure
Agreements could be formal or informal, and the process reshaped the English countryside and rural society.
Q 29John Deere's breakthrough plough solved which problem with rich Midwestern soil?
It stuck to iron and wooden ploughs
His highly polished steel surface let the soil slide off, which eased farming on the prairie and encouraged migration to the Great Plains.
Q 30John 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.