50 free Harvest trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
40 free Harvest trivia questions with answers. Harvest trivia for autumn quiz nights, church harvest suppers, classrooms and Thanksgiving tables. The 50 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The English word 'harvest' comes from an Old English word that originally meant what?
Autumn
In some British dialects it still just means the season, and it only later came to mean the act of gathering crops.
Q 02The harvest moon is defined as the full moon closest to what?
The autumn equinox
The next full moon after it is the hunter's moon; both names are recorded from the early 18th century.
Q 03Why does a harvest moon low on the horizon look golden or red?
Atmospheric scattering
Light passing through more atmosphere loses its blue and violet, leaving 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
Farmers baked loaves from the fresh wheat and gave them to the church as Communion bread.
Q 06Which writer's 40-year letter campaign led Lincoln to make Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863?
Sarah Josepha Hale
She is better known as the author of 'Mary Had a Little Lamb'.
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 lengthen the Christmas shopping season, causing two years of 'double Thanksgiving' chaos.
Q 08Canadian Thanksgiving, a harvest thanksgiving by its 1957 proclamation, falls on which day?
Second Monday in October
The proclamation gives 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
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.
Q 10China's Moon Festival, its great harvest celebration, falls on the 15th day of which lunar month?
The 8th
Mooncakes filled with lotus-seed or sweet-bean paste are eaten, and offerings go to the moon goddess Chang'e.
Q 11Which pastry is traditionally eaten at China's Moon Festival, held around the September equinox?
Mooncakes
Lanterns of every shape are carried as beacons lighting the way to prosperity.
Q 12Which half-moon rice cakes are eaten at Chuseok, Korea's harvest festival?
Songpyeon
In South Korea the holiday lasts three days around the full moon; in North Korea just one.
Q 13The Tamil festival Pongal is named after a dish of rice boiled with milk and jaggery until it does what?
Overflows the pot
On Mattu Pongal cattle are bathed, their horns painted bright colours and garlanded with flowers.
Q 21In which wealthy relative's field did Ruth glean at the barley harvest, later marrying him?
Boaz
Leviticus and Deuteronomy required farmers to leave field edges and dropped grain for the poor and the stranger.
Q 22What is the term for collecting leftover crops from a field after the main harvest?
Gleaning
The word entered English in the 14th century already carrying its second meaning, gathering information bit by bit.
Q 23Before machines, grain was beaten from the stalk with which two-piece tool?
A flail
Pliny the Elder described the alternatives in the first century: threshing boards, or a train of horses trampling the sheaves.
Q 14Onam, the harvest festival of Kerala, celebrates the annual return of which legendary king?
Mahabali
Vishnu, as the dwarf Vamana, banished him to the netherworld but let him visit his people once a year.
Q 15Vaisakhi marks the birth of the Khalsa, founded by Guru Gobind Singh in which year?
1699
It began as a Hindu grain harvest festival long before Sikhism existed and doubles as the Indian solar New Year.
Q 16Homowo, celebrated by the Ga people of Ghana, has a name that literally means what?
Hooting at hunger
It commemorates a famine the Ga endured on their migration and begins 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
Amalthea fed the hidden baby god with her milk in a cave on Mount Ida in Crete.
Q 18Corn dollies were traditionally woven from the last sheaf of the harvest to give a home to what?
The spirit of the grain
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.
Q 19Which Roman goddess of grain and agriculture gave her name to the word 'cereal'?
Ceres
She was the Roman counterpart of Demeter and had a seven-day April festival with its own games, the Ludi Ceriales.
Q 20In Greek mythology, who was the goddess of the harvest and mother of Persephone?
Demeter
Contrary to the popular telling, her daughter's months in the Underworld do not actually match the barren season of the ancient Greek calendar.
Q 24The step after threshing that separates grain from chaff relied on what?
Wind
Called winnowing: the heaviest, best grain fell nearest the thrower while the light chaff blew furthest away.
Q 25The combine harvester gets its name because it combines reaping, threshing and what third job?
Winnowing
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.
Q 26Cyrus McCormick, famous for the reaper, founded a company that became part of which corporation in 1902?
International Harvester
His father had worked on a reaper for 28 years, aided by an enslaved man named Jo Anderson, without producing a reliable one.
Q 27Which crop is grown on more land than any other food crop in the world?
Wheat
It covered 219.5 million hectares in 2024, and world trade in it exceeds all other crops combined, though maize outproduces it by weight.
Q 28Wheat was first cultivated around 9600 BC in which region?
The Fertile Crescent
World grain production has tripled since 1960.
Q 29Rice is the staple food of roughly what share of the world's population?
Over half
Asian rice was domesticated in China as long as 13,500 years ago; African rice was tamed separately about 3,000 years ago.
Q 30Maize was domesticated about 9,000 years ago in southern Mexico from which wild grass?
Teosinte
Barbara McClintock won a Nobel Prize in 1983 for discovering 'jumping genes' in maize.