Harvest Your Brainpower for This Farming History Quiz

Teosinte is a species of grass native to Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras. It is the ancestor of modern corn, also known as maize, and it was first domesticated around 6,000 years ago. Over time, teosinte, which has small ears only two to three inches long, with just five to 12 kernels, was selectively bred to create the corn we know and love today. Modern corn has ears around 12 inches long, which generally contain more than 500 kernels.

The first tractors were steam-powered and stationary. They were designed to power threshing machines, and although they were much more efficient than threshing by hand, they were cumbersome to use. In 1892, American inventor John Froelich developed a gasoline-powered tractor. These new tractors were much more maneuverable, and ushered in a new era of farm machinery that made draft animals obsolete.

The period when hunter-gatherers across Europe began to settle down and farm is known as the Neolithic Revolution. It’s called a revolution because its impact was so great and the changes to human life so radical. Nomadic life came to an end as people began cultivating crops, domesticating animals, and building settlements. The transition likely took hundreds, if not thousands of years.

Plows have long been essential to farming, allowing humans to churn the soil to grow crops. The first plows were simple handheld sticks used to scrape and dig up the surface of the soil. Later, wooden plows were pulled by draft animals, such as oxen. American inventor John Deere developed the steel plow in 1837, replacing the iron plow. Steel plows were much stronger and enabled the plowing of difficult ground.

Holstein cows first appeared around 2,000 years ago in the Netherlands. Their distinctive black-and-white spotted appearance was created by selectively breeding black cows with white cows. Holsteins are especially efficient at turning grass into milk, making them excellent dairy cows. Their black spots are unique to each cow, with no two animals sharing the same markings.

Wool became big business in medieval England as the demand for cloth grew across Europe. Most landowners in the Middle Ages turned their land over to sheep, and a huge industry sprang up to farm and process the wool. The importance of wool to British history is attested by the fact that the seat of the Lord Speaker of Parliament’s House of Lords is a large woolsack.

For most of the 19th century, ranchers in the U.S. set their animals free to roam the country’s vast prairies, which were mostly owned by the U.S. government. This system was known as “open range.” But with the invention of barbed wire in 1874, farmers began to fence off their land to prevent livestock from eating their crops. This, along with overgrazing, contributed to the end of open-range ranching.

The first crops were domesticated around 10,000 BCE in the Fertile Crescent. These included cereals such as wheat, barley, and flax. In China, rice and millet were cultivated not long afterward, starting around 6,000 BCE. Mexico saw the first squash plants farmed around 10,000 years ago, but the earliest evidence for the cultivation of corn comes from only about 5,500 years ago.

Home to some of the world’s earliest civilizations, the Fertile Crescent is the region of Mesopotamia (primarily in the modern-day Iraq) where agriculture first developed. The area benefited from especially fertile soil, fed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which allowed hunter-gatherers to begin cultivating crops around 10,000 BCE.

Archaeological evidence traces today’s chickens back to their wild ancestor, the red jungle fowl. The chicken is native to the jungles of Southeast Asia, where it scrubbed around on the forest floor to hunt for insects, fruit, and seeds. It was first domesticated in the Indus Valley around 4,000 years ago. Instead of breeding the birds for meat, cockerels were originally kept as fighting birds.