Harvest Trivia
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100 free Harvest trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
40 free Harvest trivia questions with answers. Harvest trivia for autumn quiz nights, church harvest suppers, classrooms and Thanksgiving tables. The 100 questions cover the harvest moon and why it glows red, the meaning of the word itself, and how people have given thanks for the crop everywhere: British Harvest Festival and Lammas, American and Canadian Thanksgiving, Sukkot, China's Mid-Autumn mooncakes, Korea's Chuseok, Pongal, Onam, Vaisakhi and Ghana's Homowo. Then it turns to the work: flails and winnowing, gleaning and the Book of Ruth, the first combine, McCormick's reaper, Buffalo's grain elevator, barn raisings, the crops themselves (wheat, rice, maize, pumpkins, cranberries) and the Dust Bowl and Green Revolution that changed farming forever. Easy ones come first and the last few will test a folklorist. Every answer has been checked against a reference source, shown under each question once you answer.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The English word 'harvest' comes from an Old English word that originally meant what?
Autumn
Old English hærfest simply meant 'Autumn', the season, as its German cognate Herbst does today; the sense of gathering the crops came later.
Q 02The harvest moon is defined as the full moon closest to what?
The autumn equinox
The autumn equinox falls around 22–23 September, and the harvest moon is the full moon nearest it, so it can land in September or October; the next one is the hunter's moon.
Q 03Why does a harvest moon low on the horizon look golden or red?
Atmospheric scattering
Atmospheric scattering is the cause: near the horizon moonlight crosses far more air, which scatters away blue and violet and leaves reds and yellows to dominate.
Q 04The modern British Harvest Festival is traced to Rev. Robert Hawker's 1843 service in which county?
Cornwall
His idea spread with hymns like 'Come, ye thankful people, come' and the custom of decorating churches with home-grown produce.
Q 05Lammas, the early English harvest festival on 1 August, takes its name from what?
Loaf mass
Lammas is Old English hlafmæsse, 'Loaf mass': farmers baked loaves from the first grain of the harvest and brought them to church to be blessed.
Q 06Which writer's long letter campaign led Lincoln to make Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863?
Sarah Josepha Hale
Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey's Lady's Book and author of 'Mary Had a Little Lamb', wrote to presidents for decades until Lincoln proclaimed the holiday in 1863.
Q 07Since 1942, US Thanksgiving has been fixed on which day?
The fourth Thursday in November
Roosevelt had moved it a week earlier in 1939 to stretch the shopping season; a law signed in December 1941 settled it on The fourth Thursday in November from 1942.
Q 08Canadian Thanksgiving, a harvest thanksgiving by its 1957 proclamation, falls on which day?
Second Monday in October
Parliament's 1957 proclamation fixed the Second Monday in October as a day of thanks 'for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed'.
Q 09Sukkot, the Jewish Feast of Booths, is described in the Torah as a festival of what?
Ingathering
Exodus calls Sukkot the Feast of Ingathering, marking the end of the harvest; families eat in a sukkah roofed with plant material and welcome a different biblical guest on each of the seven days.
Q 10China's Moon Festival, its great harvest celebration, falls on the 15th day of which lunar month?
The 8th
The Moon Festival falls on the 15th day of The 8th lunar month, usually in September or October, when offerings are made to the moon goddess Chang'e.
Q 11Which pastry is traditionally eaten at China's Moon Festival, held around the September equinox?
Mooncakes
Mooncakes, dense round pastries filled with lotus-seed or sweet-bean paste and often a salted egg yolk, are shared among family at the Moon Festival.
Q 12Which half-moon rice cakes are eaten at Chuseok, Korea's harvest festival?
Songpyeon
Songpyeon are half-moon rice cakes filled with sesame, beans or chestnut and steamed over a layer of pine needles, which gives them their name.
Q 13The Tamil festival Pongal is named after a dish of rice boiled with milk and jaggery until it does what?
Overflows the pot
The word pongal means 'to boil over': the rice Overflows the pot, and families shout 'Pongalo Pongal!' as it spills, a sign of abundance.
Q 21In which wealthy relative's field did Ruth glean at the barley harvest, later marrying him?
Boaz
Boaz, a wealthy kinsman of Ruth's late husband's family, let her glean in his barley field at Bethlehem and later married her; their great-grandson was King David.
Q 22What is the term for collecting leftover crops from a field after the main harvest?
Gleaning
Gleaning is the gathering of grain or produce left behind after the reapers; the Book of Ruth shows it as a right of the poor, and the word is also used for picking up scraps of information.
Q 23Before machines, grain was beaten from the stalk with which two-piece tool?
A flail
A flail is a long handle joined by a leather or rope hinge to a shorter swinging stick, swung to beat the grain loose from the ears on the threshing floor.
Q 14Onam, the harvest festival of Kerala, celebrates the annual return of which legendary king?
Mahabali
Mahabali, the generous asura king, was pushed to the netherworld by Vishnu's dwarf avatar Vamana but allowed to visit Kerala once a year, celebrated as Onam.
Q 15Vaisakhi marks the birth of the Khalsa, founded by Guru Gobind Singh in which year?
1699
Guru Gobind Singh founded the Khalsa at Anandpur on Vaisakhi in 1699; the day was already a spring harvest festival in Punjab and marks the solar new year.
Q 16Homowo, celebrated by the Ga people of Ghana, has a name that literally means what?
Hooting at hunger
Homowo means 'Hooting at hunger': the Ga mock the famine they endured on their migration, and the festival opens with the planting of millet before the rains.
Q 17The cornucopia is named in Greek myth after which creature that nursed the infant Zeus?
A goat
A goat, Amalthea, suckled the hidden infant Zeus on Crete; one of her horns, the cornucopia, became the horn of plenty that never ran empty.
Q 18Corn dollies were traditionally woven from the last sheaf of the harvest to give a home to what?
The spirit of the grain
The spirit of the grain was thought to retreat into the last sheaf, so it was plaited into a corn dolly and kept indoors until ploughing the next spring.
Q 19Which Roman goddess of grain and agriculture gave her name to the word 'cereal'?
Ceres
Ceres, goddess of grain, gives us the word 'cereal'; her seven-day April festival, the Cerealia, included its own games, the Ludi Ceriales.
Q 20In Greek mythology, who was the goddess of the harvest and mother of Persephone?
Demeter
Demeter, goddess of grain and the harvest, searched the earth for her abducted daughter Persephone; the Eleusinian Mysteries near Athens were held in honour of the two.
Q 24The step after threshing that separates grain from chaff relied on what?
Wind
Wind did the work: the threshed grain was tossed into a breeze with a shovel or basket so the light chaff blew away while the heavier kernels fell back nearest the thrower.
Q 25The combine harvester gets its name because it combines reaping, threshing and what third job?
Winnowing
Winnowing, blowing the chaff from the threshed grain, is the third job; a combine cuts, threshes and cleans the crop in one pass, leaving only straw behind.
Q 26Cyrus McCormick, famous for the reaper, founded a company that became part of which corporation in 1902?
International Harvester
International Harvester was formed in 1902 when the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company merged with Deering and three smaller makers, a deal brokered by J.P. Morgan's bank.
Q 27Which crop is grown on more land than any other food crop in the world?
Wheat
Wheat is harvested from more than 200 million hectares a year, the largest area of any crop, though maize outproduces it by weight from a smaller area.
Q 28Wheat was first cultivated around 9600 BC in which region?
The Fertile Crescent
The Fertile Crescent, the arc from the Levant to Mesopotamia, is where einkorn and emmer were first domesticated from wild grasses around the end of the last Ice Age.
Q 29Rice is the staple food of roughly what share of the world's population?
Over half
Over half of the world's people rely on rice as their staple, above all in Asia, which grows and eats about 90 per cent of the crop.
Q 30Maize was domesticated about 9,000 years ago in southern Mexico from which wild grass?
Teosinte
Teosinte, a wild grass of the Balsas River valley, was bred into maize by early farmers; its tiny hard-cased kernels look nothing like a modern cob.