Crop Cultivation Harvest for Food

Combine Harvester yielding staples—basic foods such as wheat and rice are called staple crops.

World's Bread Basket

Important wheat-producing areas of the world are called "bread baskets", and because they provide us with the bread we eat each day. Wheat is a kind of grass, and so it grows best in areas that were once natural grasslands. These include the prairies of Canada and the United States and steppes of Ukraine and southern Russia. Combine harversters move across the prairies for weeks on end, cutting the wheat and separating out the grain.

The First All-American Crops

About 500 years ago, nobody in Europe had ever seen potatoes, maize, or tomatoes. These important food crops were first developed by peoples who lived in the Americas before Europeans settlers arrived.

The Sweetest Crop Of All

Sugarcane is grown on many islands in the Caribbean region and tropical countries like Philippines in southeast Asia. In Barbados, the end of the sugar cane harvest is marked by Cropover, a grand celebration with music, dancing, and parades.

Barren Deserts Turned Green

Water can be piped into desert areas so that crops will grow there, but this kind of irrigation is expensive, and the water can wash salts from the soil, making it difficult to grow plants.

A Coconut is a Giant Nut

Coconut palms grow best on the shores of Indian and Pacific Oceans. Coconut fruits are big and green, some are golden yellow. Inside are the large, brown nuts we buy in shops for food preparation like coconut milk (gata). The white flesh inside the nut may be dried and sold as copra.

By Hand or By Machine—Modern types of rice can be produce in several harvests a year. They can be planted by machines, but these are too expensive for many farmers.

Planting is a Cash Crop

A cash crop is any crop that is sold for money. Not all crops are sold. However, many small farmers around the world can grow only enough to feed themselves and their families—there is no surplus left to sell.

Ancient Terraces—some rice terraces, like these in the Philippines, are thousands of years old.

What Grows Best in Floods and Soggy Wet Mud?

Rice keeps the world alive. Billions of people eat it every day, specially in Asia. Grains of rice are the seeds of a kind of grass the grows wild in wet river valleys. To cultivate it, farmers plant out the seedlings in flooded fields called paddies. In hilly lands, terraces are cut in the hillsides and the water flows down channels in the muddy soil.

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