212 Fun Facts About Farm

A baby goat is called what?

A kid was a young goat long before it was a child: English took the word from Old Norse around 1200, and only in the 1590s did it turn up as slang for a youngster.

Which waxy grease, washed out of freshly shorn wool, is a staple of skin creams and ointments?

Lanolin is the wax sheep secrete to keep rain out of their fleece; scouring the shorn wool washes it out, and its name simply joins the Latin words for wool and oil.

A cow's stomach has how many compartments?

A cow's stomach has four compartments: rumen, reticulum, omasum and abomasum. The rumen hosts the microbes that break down grass, and cattle re-chew regurgitated cud.

An adult female sheep is called what?

A ewe knows her own lamb by its smell, so a shepherd who wants her to adopt an orphan first rubs it with the scent of her own newborn.

Pigs roll in mud mainly to do what?

Pigs cool down by wallowing because they cannot sweat to shed heat and pant poorly, so water evaporating from a coat of mud does the job instead; the mud may also guard their skin against sunburn.

The domestic chicken descends from which wild bird of Southeast Asia?

The domestic chicken descends from the red junglefowl (Gallus gallus) of Southeast Asia; the grey junglefowl later contributed the yellow-skin gene seen in some breeds.

A modern hen bred for egg laying produces roughly how many eggs a year?

About 300 eggs a year is routine for a commercial laying hen: left alone, a hen stops when her clutch is complete and sits on it, but layers were bred to lose that broody urge and keep laying.

Chickens with red earlobes generally lay eggs of what colour?

Red-earlobed breeds generally lay brown eggs and white-earlobed breeds lay white ones, though there is no nutritional difference between the two.

A young horse that is still nursing from its mother is sometimes called what?

A suckling becomes a weanling once it leaves its mother's milk; born to a prey animal, a foal can run beside her within a few hours, because a herd on the move cannot wait.

Horses can doze on their feet, but what must they do to reach deep REM sleep?

Lie down is the only way: a 'stay apparatus' of tendons locks a dozing horse's legs, but REM sleep relaxes every muscle, so a horse kept standing for days can collapse mid-doze.

A mule is the offspring of a male donkey and what?

A mule is the offspring of a male donkey (jack) and a female horse (mare); mules are almost always sterile because horse and donkey chromosome counts differ, 64 against 62.

Most domestic ducks descend from which wild species?

The mallard is the ancestor of nearly every farm duck, and the two remain one species: escaped domestic ducks breed freely with wild mallards and their young are fully fertile.

On a turkey, which fleshy growth that droops over the beak shares its name with a hair net?

The snood is the fleshy flap above a turkey's beak that lengthens and reddens when a male displays; the wattle is the growth hanging beneath the beak.

Baby turkeys are called what?

Baby turkeys are poults; turkeys were domesticated in central Mexico and reached Europe with the Spanish in the 16th century.

Alpacas were traditionally herded in the mountains of which continent?

Alpacas come from the high plateaus of South America and exist only as a farm animal: herders there bred them from the wild vicuña thousands of years ago, selecting for fleece.

The Holstein Friesian is the dominant breed in which kind of farming?

The Holstein Friesian comes from the North Sea grasslands of Holland and Friesland, where dairy farmers are believed to have spent some 2,000 years selecting the cows that turned the most grass into milk.

The shaggy, long-horned Highland breed of cattle comes from which country?

Scotland's Highland cattle wear a double coat, long oily outer hair over a downy underlayer, which is why they thrive on rough grazing in cold, wet hill weather.

The Border Collie was bred mainly to do what job?

Border Collies herd sheep with 'the eye', a fixed, intimidating stare that moves a flock without a bite and may be a leftover of the wolf's stalk; the breed took shape on the Anglo-Scottish border.

Which kingdom guarded its fine-woolled Merino sheep as a monopoly for centuries, banning their export?

Spain made taking a Merino out of the country a capital crime until the 1700s, when its kings began sending flocks to other courts as gifts; from those descend the sheep of Australia's wool trade.

Which animal was the first to be domesticated by humans?

The dog was tamed from wolves by hunter-gatherers thousands of years before anyone farmed, which makes it the one farmyard animal older than the farm.

Domestic cattle descend from which huge wild ox that once ranged across Europe and Asia?

The aurochs was first tamed in south-west Asia more than ten thousand years ago and outlived that by millennia, until hunting and lost habitat finished it: the last one died in Poland in 1627.

Maize (corn) was first domesticated about 9,000 years ago in which modern country?

Maize was domesticated in the Balsas River valley of southern Mexico about 9,000 years ago from a wild grass called teosinte, whose tiny hard kernels look nothing like a modern cob.

Which crop is the staple food of about half the world's people?

Rice feeds about half of humanity, and unlike other grains most of it grows standing in water: seedlings are moved into paddies kept a few centimetres deep until shortly before harvest.

The potato was first domesticated in which region?

The Andes gave the world the potato, and farmers there also learned to freeze-dry it: tubers left out on freezing nights and trampled underfoot become chuño, which keeps for years.

Wheat was first cultivated around 9600 BC in which region?

In the Fertile Crescent wild wheat shattered when ripe and scattered its grain; each harvest favoured the rare ears that held on, so without meaning to, farmers bred a wheat that waits to be gathered.

The soybean is the world's most widely grown example of what kind of plant?

The soybean is a legume, and like its relatives it hosts bacteria in its roots that take nitrogen from the air, so the crop feeds the soil it grows in.

Cotton fibre grows inside a protective case around the seeds called what?

A boll is also where the boll weevil lays its eggs; the beetle wrecked so many crops that Enterprise, Alabama, raised a monument to it in 1919 for forcing farmers to try peanuts.

Who invented the modern cotton gin in 1793?

Eli Whitney built his cotton gin in 1793 and patented it in 1794; it made short-staple cotton profitable, with grim consequences for the expansion of slavery.

John Deere made his name in 1837 by inventing the first commercially successful what?

John Deere, a Vermont blacksmith who moved to Illinois, made a polished steel plough in 1837 that shed the sticky prairie soil which clogged cast-iron ploughs.

Cyrus McCormick is credited as the inventor of which farm machine?

The mechanical reaper he first showed in Virginia in 1831 sold slowly at first; in 1847 McCormick moved to Chicago to build it close to the prairie grain fields and the new railways, and there it made his fortune.

Joseph Glidden of DeKalb, Illinois, patented the modern form of what in 1874?

Barbed wire in Joseph Glidden's 1874 design was cheap enough to fence whole ranches, and by 1890 fenced pasture had all but replaced the open range of the American West.

The combine harvester gets its name because it combines reaping, threshing and what?

Winnowing separates grain from its chaff: farmers once tossed the threshed crop into the air so the wind carried off the light husks, a job the combine's fan now does as it drives.

John Froelich built an early gasoline-powered tractor in 1892 in which state?

Iowa: Froelich built it to replace the steam engine that drove his threshing machine, and the Waterloo firm set up to make it was bought in 1918 by John Deere, which got into tractors that way.

A trench cut into the soil by a plough is called what?

A furrow gave English the furlong, literally a 'furrow long': the length of one ploughed strip in a medieval common field, later fixed at an eighth of a mile.

Grass or maize that is chopped, packed airtight and left to ferment into winter feed is called what?

Silage is pickled fodder: sealed away from air, bacteria turn the crop's sugars into acids, the same souring that makes sauerkraut, so the feed keeps for months.

Which root crop, grown to feed livestock through winter, earned the farming viscount Charles Townshend his nickname?

Turnips let the Norfolk four-course rotation that 'Turnip' Townshend championed keep every field working: sown between grain crops, they fed cattle and sheep through winter, and the animals' manure fed the next harvest.

Norman Borlaug won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for developing what?

High-yield dwarf wheat, bred by Borlaug in Mexico with short stems that did not buckle under heavy heads, nearly doubled harvests in Pakistan and India between 1965 and 1970; he is often credited with saving a billion lives.

Louis Pasteur devised pasteurisation in the 1860s to stop what spoiling, decades before its use on milk?

Wine was the problem: in 1864 Pasteur showed that briefly heating it killed the microbes that turned it sour, and he patented the method; only in 1886 did a German chemist propose it for milk.

Butter is made by churning what?

Butter is made by churning cream until the fat globules clump and separate from the buttermilk; the finished product is roughly 80 percent butterfat.

In cheesemaking, what is the watery liquid drained off the solid curds called?

Whey is far from waste: Italian cheesemakers heat it again to make ricotta, whose name means 'cooked again', and its proteins are sold as the powder in gym shakes.

A honeybee colony has one queen, tens of thousands of female workers and, in summer, a smaller number of what?

Drones are the colony's males: they have no sting and gather no food, so when autumn comes the workers drive them out of the hive to die rather than feed them through winter.

Worker honeybees tell each other where food is by doing what?

A waggle dance on the comb tells nestmates where to fly: the angle of the run gives the direction relative to the sun and its length the distance, a code Karl von Frisch cracked on the way to a Nobel Prize.

The four Hs of the youth organisation 4-H stand for Head, Heart, Hands and what?

Health was a later choice: the fourth H at first stood for 'Hustle', and the pledge now promises 'my health to better living'.

The official colours of the National FFA Organization are national blue and what?

Corn gold joined national blue as the FFA colours in 1929; founded as the Future Farmers of America, the group dropped that name in 1988 because its members were heading into science and business as well as farming.

In Charlotte's Web, what does Charlotte first weave into her web to save Wilbur?

'Some Pig' comes first, then 'Terrific', 'Radiant' and 'Humble'; E. B. White had nursed a dying pig of his own and written about losing it in 1948, four years before the novel.

In George Orwell's Animal Farm, the animals rename the estate after ousting which farmer?

Mr. Jones, a drinker who neglects his animals, is driven off and Manor Farm becomes Animal Farm; by the last chapter the ruling pigs have restored the old name.

The Corn Palace, redecorated each year with murals made of corn, is in which US state?

South Dakota's Corn Palace in Mitchell began in 1892 as an advertisement, built to show the world how rich the state's farmland was; today's corn-covered building is the third Corn Palace.

The first Farm Aid concert in 1985 was organised by Willie Nelson, Neil Young and which other musician?

John Mellencamp joined Willie Nelson and Neil Young after Bob Dylan said from the Live Aid stage that he hoped some of the money could go to American farmers; that September the first Farm Aid played Champaign, Illinois.

The Homestead Act, giving settlers land in the West, was signed by which president in 1862?

Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act on 20 May 1862; it passed only once the Southern states had seceded and the congressmen who had blocked earlier versions had left.

Which Steinbeck novel follows Oklahoma farmers fleeing the 1930s Dust Bowl?

The Grapes of Wrath sends the Joads, evicted from their tenant farm, down Route 66 to California, drawn by handbills promising farm work that turns out scarce and poorly paid.

Growing crops indoors in stacked layers, an idea popularised by a Columbia professor in 1999, is called what?

Vertical farming began as a classroom exercise: Dickson Despommier and his Columbia students designed a skyscraper of indoor crops to grow more food on less land, and the idea outgrew the class.

Under USDA rules, what must poultry have been allowed for its meat to be labelled 'free range'?

Access to the outdoors is all a producer must show the agency: the rule sets no size or quality for the range, so the label promises a way outside, not a pasture.

Abilene, Kansas, boomed after 1867 as the railhead at the end of which cattle trail?

The Chisholm Trail ran on simple arithmetic: a longhorn worth a few dollars in Texas could fetch up to $40 in northern markets, so Joseph McCoy built stockyards at Abilene to ship herds east by rail.

In which country is a scarecrow called a kakashi and honoured in ancient myth as a god of knowledge?

Japan's oldest chronicle, the Kojiki, has a scarecrow god, Kuebiko, who cannot walk yet knows what the other gods do not: he is the one who can name a tiny stranger arriving by sea.

Hay is grass or legumes that have been cut and what?

Dried is the point: hay stacked while still damp keeps fermenting and heating, and a wet stack can grow hot enough to catch fire without a spark.

Centuries before the Dutch built theirs, the earliest known windmills were grinding grain in which region?

Persia's first windmills stood in Sistan, where a strong summer wind blows for about 120 days on end; sails on an upright shaft behind slotted walls turned the millstones directly, with no gears.

The word 'tractor' comes from a Latin verb meaning what?

'To pull' is the Latin trahere, which also gave English 'traction' and, by way of French, 'train'; long before farms had them, 'tractors' were a 1790s quack's metal rods, passed over the skin to cure pain.

Harry Ferguson's three-point hitch reached American farms after a 1938 handshake deal with which carmaker?

Henry Ford built Ferguson's hitch into his 9N tractor on nothing more than a handshake; when Ford's grandson ended the arrangement in 1947, Ferguson sued and settled for about $9 million.

The word 'barn' comes from Old English words meaning a storehouse for which grain?

Barley was the chief grain of Anglo-Saxon England, so its bere-aern, literally 'barley house', became the word for a farm's storehouse whatever was kept in it.

By the usual account, why were so many barns in the northern United States painted red?

Red iron-oxide paint was cheapest, the usual story runs: rust-based ferric oxide was the pigment farmers could most easily get, and it may also have helped preserve the wood.

The word 'silo' is usually traced to an Ancient Greek word for what?

'Silo' is usually traced back to the Greek siros, a pit for holding grain, though an old Iberian word is also proposed; either way the first silos were pits, and the upright tower dates only from the 1870s.

Domestic geese in Europe descend from which wild bird?

The greylag goose is the wild ancestor of Europe's farm geese, and its goslings made Konrad Lorenz famous: hatched in an incubator, they followed him about as their mother, the classic demonstration of imprinting.

What is a male goose called?

A gander is a male goose, and the way a goose cranes its long neck to see is why 'to take a gander' came to mean having a good look.

The tuft of coarse, hair-like bristles hanging from a male turkey's chest is called what?

A beard on a turkey looks like a hank of coarse black hair but is made of modified feathers, and it is no sure sign of a tom: a few hens grow one too.

Which turkey variety is the standard bird of large-scale commercial farms?

The Broad Breasted White is the standard commercial turkey, bred for so much breast meat that the birds can seldom mate naturally, so flocks are produced by artificial insemination.

Which of these farm animals is an omnivore rather than a herbivore?

The pig is an omnivore with a simple single-chambered stomach, so it digests fibrous hay poorly; rabbits, goats and horses are herbivores built to ferment plant matter.

Growing the same crop in the same field year after year is called what?

Monocropping, growing one crop in the same field year after year, depletes nutrients and lets crop-specific pests and weeds build up; rotation breaks those cycles.

Crops such as clover grown only to be ploughed back into the soil are called what?

Green manure is a crop such as clover, vetch or rye grown to be ploughed back in while still green, adding organic matter and, with legumes, nitrogen to the soil.

Under the medieval three-field system, what fraction of the land was planted each year?

Under the three-field system two thirds of the land was sown each year, one field with winter grain and one with spring crops, while the third lay fallow; it spread from the 9th century.

Sumerian farmers dug some of the world's earliest irrigation canals in what is now which country?

Iraq's southern plain gets too little rain for crops, so Sumer's cities lived by canals from the Tigris and Euphrates; in time the irrigation salted the soil and wheat harvests fell away.

Which watering method delivers water straight to the plant's root zone?

Drip irrigation trickles water through emitters straight to the root zone, so little is lost to evaporation; the plastic dripper that made it practical was developed in Israel by Simcha Blass in the 1960s.

Which irrigation system, invented by farmer Frank Zybach in the 1940s, draws the green crop circles seen from the air?

The centre-pivot sprinkler swings a wheeled pipe around a central well; it turned dry prairie into cropland, but the pumping has drawn down the Ogallala Aquifer beneath the Great Plains.

The N, P and K on a fertilizer bag stand for nitrogen, phosphorus and what?

K stands for potassium, from its Latin name kalium; the three numbers on a bag give the percentages of nitrogen, phosphate and potash.

Which industrial method for making ammonia led to a boom in nitrogen fertilizer use?

The Haber process pulls nitrogen out of the air: Fritz Haber showed it in 1909, Carl Bosch scaled it up at BASF, and fertiliser made this way is estimated to feed about half the world's people.

Aratrum, the Romans' plough, shares its Latin root with which English farming word?

Arable land is literally ploughable land, from Latin arare, 'to plough'; the light, wheelless aratrum suited Mediterranean topsoil but could not break the heavier soils of northern Europe.

Besides honey, which of these is a product beekeepers harvest from the hive?

Propolis, the resinous 'bee glue' that bees gather from tree buds to seal the hive, is scraped off and sold; beeswax, pollen and royal jelly are other hive products.

The traditional domed beehive made of coiled straw is called what?

A skep is the traditional domed hive of coiled straw; because the comb cannot be removed without destroying it, skeps gave way to movable-frame hives in the 19th century.

Which American developed the movable comb hive that transformed beekeeping in the 19th century?

Lorenzo Langstroth, a Philadelphia-born clergyman, patented his movable-frame hive in 1852; he built it around the 'bee space', the gap bees leave clear, so frames lift out without tearing the comb.

How do honeybees dry nectar into honey?

Fanning with wings moves air over the open cells until the honey is down to about 18 percent water, too dry for yeasts to ferment; only then do the bees seal each cell with wax.

Which Andean pack animal lies down, spits and refuses to move when its load is too heavy?

The llama was the Inca Empire's only beast of burden, so whatever did not travel on a porter's back crossed the Andes in llama caravans along the imperial roads.

The word 'llama' was adopted by European settlers from which language, spoken by millions in the Andes?

Quechua, the tongue of the Inca, gave English 'llama' and 'jerky' as well, the second from ch'arki, its term for dried meat.

The donkey was domesticated 5,000 to 7,000 years ago on which continent?

Africa's wild ass became the donkey probably in the hands of Nubian herders, who made it their pack animal in place of the ox; it has been carrying loads since at least 4000 BC.

What is an adult female donkey called?

A jenny, or jennet, is an adult female donkey and a jack the male; Nero's wife Poppaea is said to have kept a herd of jennies so that she could bathe in their milk.

The miniature donkey kept as a pet was originally bred on which Mediterranean islands?

The Miniature Mediterranean donkey, under 36 inches at the withers, was bred on Sardinia and Sicily to turn grain mills and carry loads; Americans began importing them in the 1920s.

What is the first milk produced after birth, rich in antibodies, called?

Colostrum, the yellowish first milk, is a newborn calf's lifeline: no antibodies cross a cow's placenta, so the calf's only early antibodies come from the colostrum it drinks.

What makes the holes in Swiss cheese?

Gas from bacteria makes the holes: as a Swiss cheese such as Emmental ripens, propionic acid bacteria give off carbon dioxide, and the trapped bubbles become its 'eyes'.

The Farmers' Almanac says its weather formula tracks which solar feature?

Sunspots: the almanac, founded in 1818, keeps its forecasting formula proprietary, saying only that it follows its founding editor's rules adjusted for solar activity, the Moon's motion and other factors.

Growing crops with their roots in a nutrient solution instead of soil is called what?

Hydroponics feeds plants a mineral solution in place of soil; the scientist who championed it in the 1930s first called it aquiculture, then renamed it to echo geoponics, an old word for working the earth.

Pumpkins belong to which plant genus?

Pumpkins are in the genus Cucurbita alongside squashes and courgettes; 'pumpkin' has no scientific definition and covers forms of several species, chiefly C. pepo, C. maxima and C. moschata.

The Araucana chicken from Chile is famous for laying eggs of what colour?

The Araucana, a breed from Chile that is often rumpless with tufts of feathers at its ears, lays blue eggs because of a dominant gene; crossed with brown-egg layers it gives green and olive eggs.

A young female chicken under a year old is called what?

A pullet is a hen under a year old; on egg farms the name lasts only until she starts to lay, at around 16 to 21 weeks, and a capon is a castrated male.

What are the spiral bands that hold an egg yolk in place inside the white called?

The chalazae are twisted cords of egg white that hold the yolk at the centre of the egg; bakers sometimes strain them out for an even texture, and the name is Greek for 'hailstone'.

Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary defined which grain as horse feed in England but people's food in Scotland?

Oats, Johnson wrote, are 'a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people'; the jibe had a basis, since oats need less summer heat and more rain than wheat.

On a maize plant, what are the male, pollen-producing parts called?

Tassels at the top of the stalk shed pollen onto the silks of the ears below; each silk leads to one potential kernel, so a silk that catches no pollen leaves a gap on the cob.

Soaking maize in an alkaline solution such as lime water is called what?

Nixtamalization, soaking maize in lime water, loosens the hulls and frees the grain's niacin; Mesoamerican cooks invented it, which is why corn-eating peoples there avoided pellagra.

Sheep are most likely descended from which wild animal?

The mouflon of western Asia is the likeliest ancestor of domestic sheep; Europe's own mouflon, on a few Mediterranean islands, is thought to be the reverse, a descendant of early farm sheep that went wild.

The Suffolk sheep breed is recognisable by what feature?

A black face and legs, bare of wool, mark the Suffolk, bred from Norfolk Horn ewes and Southdown rams; farmers put Suffolk rams to other breeds' ewes to get fast-growing lambs.

The shepherd's hooked staff used to catch a sheep by the leg is called what?

A shepherd's crook is a long staff with a curved hook used to catch a sheep by the neck or hind leg; the bishop's crozier copies its shape.

Europe's first farm pigs were brought from which region, where wild boar had been domesticated?

The Near East, around the Tigris basin, is where wild boar were first kept as pigs; farmers took them into Europe, where they bred with local boar until under 5 percent of that ancestry was left.

Which country is the world's largest pork producer?

China raises and eats about half of the world's pork, and the meat matters so much there that since 2007 the government has kept a strategic pork reserve to steady prices.

A pig's snout is strengthened by a special bone and a disc of what at the tip?

Cartilage forms the tough disc at the tip of the snout, backed by a prenasal bone, so a pig can plough up soil in search of food; farmers fit nose rings to stop pigs rooting up their fields.

Goats were first domesticated about 10,000 years ago in the Zagros Mountains of which country?

Iran: at Ganj Dareh in the Zagros, goat bones show young males killed early while females were kept on to breed, the mark of people managing animals, not hunting them.

A young female cow that has not yet had a calf is called what?

A heifer is a young female that has not yet had a calf; dairy farmers usually start breeding heifers at about 13 months old, and once she calves a heifer is simply called a cow.

Which humped cattle arose from a separate domestication in the Indian subcontinent?

The zebu was domesticated in South Asia separately from Europe's cattle; its tolerance of heat and insects is why American ranchers bred it into the Brahman.

Texas Longhorn cattle descend mainly from animals brought to the Americas by whom?

Spanish conquistadors and colonists brought the cattle from Iberia from 1493; their descendants ran half-wild in Texas for generations, later mixing with settlers' British stock to give the hardy Longhorn.

The Hereford beef breed originated in a county of which country?

The Hereford comes from Herefordshire in England; its white face is a dominant trait, so crossbred calves such as the Black Baldy, bred from Angus cows, carry it too.

Santa Gertrudis cattle, part Brahman and part Shorthorn, were bred on which Texas ranch?

King Ranch wanted beef cattle that thrive in the South Texas heat; every Santa Gertrudis descends from one bull, named Monkey for his playful ways.

Jersey cattle come from an island in which group?

Jersey cattle come from Jersey in the Channel Islands, which kept the breed pure by banning cattle imports for over a century; their milk is high in butterfat with a yellowish tinge.

The Leghorn chicken breed takes its name from the English name of which Italian port?

Livorno was long called Leghorn in English; the birds shipped from the Tuscan port to America in the 19th century were at first known simply as 'Italians' and only later took the port's name.

Which chicken breed has fur-like plumage, black skin, and five toes on each foot?

The Silkie is named for plumage that feels like silk; Marco Polo, travelling through Asia in the 13th century, wrote of black fowls with hair like a cat's fur in place of feathers.

The Berkshire pig, named for an English county, is normally what colour?

Black with white points is the modern look: until the 1700s the Berkshire was a large tawny pig, and crosses with small black pigs from Asia gave it the dark coat with white feet, snout and tail tip.

The American Duroc pig ranges in colour from golden to what?

Dark reddish-brown is the deep end of the Duroc's range; the breed is said to take its name from a red boar that a New York farmer named Duroc in 1823, after the seller's famous trotting stallion.

Which English draught horse breed has held world records for the largest and tallest horse?

The Shire holds the records: Sampson, a Shire foaled in 1846, stood 21.25 hands and weighed about 1,500 kg; Shires towed canal barges and pulled brewers' drays.

The Percheron draft horse originated in which country?

France: the Percheron comes from the old province of Perche; thousands were shipped to the United States before the First World War, and it became the most popular draft horse in North America.

An ox used for ploughing is usually what kind of animal?

A castrated adult male is the usual ox: castration curbs testosterone and aggression, leaving a docile animal that is safer to work, and oxen are normally yoked in pairs.

Which large domesticated bovine originated in South and Southeast Asia?

The water buffalo was domesticated in South and Southeast Asia, where it pulls ploughs through rice paddies; it is also farmed in Italy for mozzarella, in the Balkans, Australia and the Americas.

The word 'yak' comes from which language?

In Tibetan the word refers only to the male; the female is a 'dri'.

In emus, which parent incubates the eggs?

The male emu incubates the clutch alone for about eight weeks, hardly eating or drinking and losing up to a third of his weight, then guards the chicks for months.

Which bird, farmed for its meat, leather and feathers, is the fastest runner on two legs?

The ostrich can sprint at about 70 km/h on its two-toed feet and keep up 50 km/h over distance, faster than any other two-legged animal; cornered, it fights back with powerful kicks.

The American cowboy tradition arose from the vaqueros of which region?

The vaquero tradition grew up on the cattle haciendas of northern Mexico after Spanish settlers brought Iberian herding methods; Anglo cowboys copied their saddles, roping and words such as lariat and rodeo.

A cowboy who specifically tends the horses used to work cattle is called what?

A wrangler looks after the remuda, the herd of spare saddle horses on a ranch or cattle drive; the job often went to the youngest or lowest-ranking hand in the crew.

On a cattle drive, which wagon carried the food and served as a kitchen for the cook?

The chuckwagon is credited to Texas rancher Charles Goodnight, who in 1866 fitted a sturdy wagon with a 'chuck box' of drawers and a hinged lid that folded down into a worktable for a trail drive.

Before threshing machines, farm workers beat grain from the ear with which jointed wooden tool?

A flail is a long handle with a shorter stick swinging from its end; threshing with it took about a quarter of all farm labour, and the machines that replaced it helped set off England's Swing Riots of 1830.

The 'snath' is the long shaft of which hay-mowing tool?

The scythe's shaft is its snath, fitted with one or two short handles; its length lets a mower stand upright and swing a long blade just above the ground without stooping.

A curved single-handed blade for reaping grain is called a sickle or, in Latin, what?

Falx is Latin for a sickle; the Dacians' war version of the same curved blade was so feared that Roman legionaries are thought to have added iron reinforcing straps to their helmets to face it.

Which machine packs cut hay or straw into tight, twine-tied bundles?

A baler packs hay or straw into bales bound with twine, wire or net; a big round bale sheds rain much as a thatched roof does, which is why so much hay is now stored outdoors.

The 'barrow' in wheelbarrow comes from an Old English word for what?

A device for carrying loads: the word is traced to Old English bearwe, from beran, 'to bear', a frame that two people carried; the burial-mound 'barrow' is unrelated, from beorg, 'hill'.

The long, slender prongs of a pitchfork are called what?

Tines are a pitchfork's prongs, kept long, thin and widely spaced so that loose hay can be lifted and pitched; a garden fork's tines are shorter and thicker, for prying up soil.

What tempts a cow into a robotic milking stall on her own?

Feed is the lure: each visit earns the cow a ration of tasty concentrate in the stall, so she walks in when she chooses and the robot attaches the milking cups itself.

A cream separator uses what force to split milk into cream and skimmed milk?

Centrifugal force does it: the spinning bowl flings the heavier skimmed milk outward while the lighter cream gathers at the centre, so dairies no longer had to leave milk standing until the cream rose.

Under French law, foie gras must be the liver of a duck or goose fattened by what method?

Gavage (force feeding) through a tube is written into French law's definition of foie gras, 'fat liver'; the practice goes back some 4,500 years to Egypt, where farmers fattened birds by overfeeding them.

Most veal comes from young male calves of which type of cattle breed?

Most veal comes from male calves of dairy breeds, which cannot give milk and are not wanted for breeding; veal production adds value to them.

Mohair is made from the hair of which animal?

Mohair is the long silky fleece of the Angora goat, a Turkish breed clipped twice a year; in the 1800s Angora billies were shipped to southern Africa and the American Southwest to upgrade ordinary goat herds.

The word 'cashmere' is an anglicisation of which region's name?

Cashmere is the old English spelling of Kashmir, whose goats' soft undercoat was woven into the shawls that were fashionable in Europe by the early 19th century.

Angora wool comes from the long coat of which animal?

Angora wool is the silky coat of the Angora rabbit, gathered by shearing, combing or plucking; its hollow fibres make it much warmer and lighter than sheep's wool.

Where do US beef cattle typically spend their last months fattening on grain?

A feedlot takes calves raised on grass and pens them on a grain-heavy ration to put on weight before slaughter; the largest US lots are regulated as CAFOs, concentrated animal feeding operations.

Textiles made from the flax plant are known as what?

Linen is woven from fibres in the stem of the flax plant; the Latin for a linen thread, linea, gave English the word 'line', and clothes were first 'lined' with linen cloth.

Which cereal is much more tolerant of cold and poor soil than other grains?

Rye survives cold and poor, sandy soils that defeat wheat, which is why it is the bread grain of Eastern and Northern Europe into Russia.

Which tiny-grained cereal is fermented to make the Ethiopian flatbread injera?

Teff, a grass native to Ethiopia, is ground and fermented into spongy injera; its seeds are under a millimetre across, so small that a single handful is enough to sow a large plot.

What is alfalfa called in Britain?

Lucerne is the British name for alfalfa; the plant's roots usually go two or three metres down and can reach far deeper for groundwater, which keeps it growing through dry spells.

In 2022, Russia and Ukraine together grew about half of the world's crop of which oilseed?

Sunflower seed: Russia and Ukraine grew 51 percent of the world's harvest in 2022, so the invasion that year pushed sunflower oil prices up by as much as 58 percent in a single month.

The peanut's species name hypogaea refers to what unusual habit?

Fruiting underground is what hypogaea, Greek for 'under the earth', describes: after the flower is fertilised its stalk bends down and pushes a peg into the soil, where the pods ripen.

Which part of the hop plant goes into beer?

The cone-like flowers of the female hop plant, rich in bitter resins and aromatic oils, go into beer; only female plants are grown for commercial production.

Maple syrup was first made by whom?

Indigenous peoples of the Northeast were boiling maple sap into syrup and sugar long before Europeans arrived; French settlers learned from them how to tap the trees and boil the sap down.

Farmall tractors were made by which American company?

International Harvester built the Farmall high and nimble enough to cultivate between crop rows, the job earlier tractors had left to horses, so a family farm could finally give up its teams.

Massey Ferguson tractors are traditionally painted which colour?

Red and grey arrived in December 1957 with the MF35, the first tractor to carry the Massey Ferguson name; Ferguson's own machines had been plain grey, like the famous 'Little Grey Fergie'.

Which Japanese tractor maker began in Osaka in 1890 as an iron foundry?

Kubota began in 1890 as Gonshiro Kubota's casting foundry in Osaka and within three years was making cast-iron water pipes; tractors came generations later, and the headquarters is still in the city.

Which Italian sports-car maker's founder started out building tractors from war-surplus parts in 1948?

Lamborghini: Ferruccio Lamborghini built his first 'Carioca' tractors from the engines and differentials of surplus military trucks, then founded Automobili Lamborghini in 1963.

In rodeo, a mounted 'hazer' assists the competitor in which event?

In steer wrestling, or bulldogging, the hazer rides on the steer's far side to keep it running straight while the competitor leaps from his horse and wrestles it down by the horns.

Grant Wood said the woman in American Gothic was the farmer's what?

His daughter, by Wood's own account: a 1941 letter of his calls the woman the farmer's 'grown-up daughter'. The models were his sister Nan and his dentist, Byron McKeeby.

Which sitcom starred Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor as New Yorkers who move to a farm?

Green Acres ran on CBS from 1965 to 1971, with Eddie Albert as lawyer Oliver Douglas and Eva Gabor as Lisa in Hooterville; CBS cancelled it in its 1971 'rural purge'.

Chicken Run (2000) was the first feature-length film from which animation studio?

Aardman, the studio behind Wallace & Gromit, made Chicken Run as its first feature; Peter Lord and Nick Park modelled it on prison-break films such as The Great Escape, with hens as the inmates.

Shaun the Sheep first appeared in which 1995 Wallace & Gromit film?

Shaun debuted in A Close Shave (1995), where Wallace's Knit-O-Matic shears him; his own series premiered on CBBC in 2007.

The 1995 film Babe was adapted from which Dick King-Smith novel?

The Sheep-Pig, sold in the US as Babe: The Gallant Pig, drew on Dick King-Smith's own past: he farmed for 20 years before becoming a teacher and publishing his first children's book in 1978.

Who developed the 2016 farm life game Stardew Valley?

Eric Barone, working alone as ConcernedApe, did the writing, art, music and programming of Stardew Valley himself over several years; the player inherits a grandfather's run-down farm.

Which company launched the Facebook farming game FarmVille in 2009?

Zynga launched FarmVille on Facebook in June 2009 and by March 2010 nearly 84 million people a month were playing; the original closed at the end of 2020 because it ran on Adobe Flash, which was being retired.

Sugarcane's main cultivated species was first domesticated on which island?

New Guinea is where Papuan farmers first domesticated sugarcane, Saccharum officinarum; Austronesian sailors then carried it across the Pacific and west into Asia.

The tomato belongs to the same plant family as tobacco, potatoes and what?

Tomatoes, potatoes, tobacco and chili peppers are all nightshades (Solanaceae), as is the aubergine; botanically the tomato's fruit is a berry, though it is eaten as a vegetable.

Farmers who work a landowner's fields in return for part of the harvest are called what?

Sharecroppers pay their rent with a share of the crop; the system spread across the US South after the Civil War, where families bought supplies on credit from local merchants and could end the year still in debt.

Cutting away the dung-caked wool around a sheep's rear is called what?

Dagging removes the soiled wool (dags) around a sheep's rear to prevent flystrike; docking shortens lambs' tails, drenching doses them against worms, and dipping treats the fleece for parasites.

Earthworms get the credit, but which mostly microscopic worms are the most numerous animals in compost?

Nematodes, tiny transparent roundworms, are the most abundant animals in a compost heap: a handful holds several million, some grazing on the bacteria and fungi that do most of the rotting.

The word 'bacon' comes from a Proto-Germanic word meaning what?

Back meat is the root sense: 'bacon' came through Old French from a Germanic word related to 'back', yet streaky bacon is cut from the pig's belly.

Which US market, opened in 1907, is famous for fishmongers who throw customers' orders across the stall?

Pike Place in Seattle only took up fish-throwing in the 1980s, when one near-bankrupt stall set out to make itself world famous.

The floating market at Damnoen Saduak, where vendors trade from boats on narrow canals, is in which country?

Thailand dug the Damnoen Saduak Canal in the 1860s on the orders of King Rama IV, and floating markets grew up along it and some 200 side canals cut by villagers.

The French Market, which began on the spot where Café du Monde now stands, is a landmark of which US city?

New Orleans has kept the site as a market since 1791, though trading there goes back to a Native American post older than the colony itself.

La Boqueria, a covered food market first recorded in 1217, opens onto the boulevard La Rambla in which city?

Barcelona's market began as tables set up near the old city gate to sell meat, and it is now one of the city's foremost tourist landmarks.

Costermongers, Britain's street sellers of produce, took their name from a medieval variety of which fruit?

Apple is the root: a costard was a medieval variety and a monger a seller, and the word later stretched to cover anyone hawking fresh produce from a basket or cart.

The 'truck' in truck farm, an American term for a market garden, comes from an old word with which meaning?

Barter is the sense behind it, so a truck farm raised vegetables to trade at market. The name for the vehicle has a separate origin.

Which dry measure, equal to a quarter of a bushel, did Peter Piper's pickled peppers come in?

A peck is eight dry quarts, and four of them make a bushel. American growers still sell apples by the peck, but in Britain the measure is obsolete and lingers mainly in the old rhyme.

The Original Farmers Market, with its clock tower at Third and Fairfax, has traded since 1934 in which US city?

Los Angeles got the market when a dozen farmers began parking their trucks on the Gilmore family's ranch to sell produce to local residents.

Reading Terminal Market has traded since 1893 beneath the former train shed of a railroad in which US city?

Philadelphia wanted its street markets moved indoors for safety and sanitation, so the Reading Railroad's elevated tracks were built over the new market hall.

Which Paris site, dubbed the city's belly by Émile Zola, lost its food market when the trade moved to Rungis?

Les Halles gave Zola the setting for his 1873 novel Le Ventre de Paris. Its iron market pavilions were torn down in the early 1970s once the wholesalers had left for the suburbs.

Which London food market, just south of Southwark Cathedral, claims to have existed since the year 1014?

Borough rests its claim on the Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson, who described Southwark as a great market town when recounting an incident of 1014.

New York's best-known Greenmarket, part of a programme begun in 1976, is held at which Manhattan location?

Union Square hosts it four days a week, all year round. The programme's very first market was held further uptown, at 59th Street and Second Avenue, and quickly proved a success.

St. Lawrence Market, named the world's best food market by National Geographic in 2012, is in which Canadian city?

Toronto was still the small town of York when an 1803 proclamation set aside the land, because local farmers had no fixed place or day to sell their goods.

Central Market, on a site deeded as a public marketplace in 1730, sells Amish foods in which Pennsylvania city?

Lancaster ran it as the oldest municipally operated market in the United States until 2005, when the city handed it over to a trust.

Which berry basket was devised, by one account, by an ancestor of the geneticist behind the inheritance square?

A punnet keeps soft berries from bruising in British shops. Reginald Punnett's biography credits a strawberry-growing ancestor with devising it, though the word's origin is uncertain.

At unattended roadside produce stands in rural Britain, shoppers leave their payment in a container called what?

An honesty box suits places where customers are few and the goods cheap, because paying someone to mind the stall would cost more than it earned.

Which London piazza housed the capital's main fruit and vegetable market until it moved to Nine Elms in 1974?

Covent Garden's market had grown up by 1654 as a small open-air affair on the south side of a fashionable square, and traffic congestion finally drove it out.

Which word for a family treasure handed down the generations also describes old, open-pollinated tomato varieties?

Heirloom varieties are open-pollinated, so seed saved from one year's fruit breeds true the next, which is how gardeners kept them going for generations.

Queen Victoria Market, billed as the largest open-air market in the Southern Hemisphere, is a landmark of which city?

Melbourne built and expanded the market over its first British burial ground, a cemetery where an estimated 10,000 graves lay.

Which word describes arable land left unsown for a season or more so the soil can recover and hold moisture?

Fallow land rebuilds its organic matter while it rests, and the break also starves crop pests and soil diseases of the hosts they live on.

A long line of cut hay raked together in the field, ready to be gathered, is known by which name?

A windrow is usually formed by a hay rake, or simply falls behind the mower. Small grain crops get one too, laid by a machine called a swather.

Which word for the dry husks stripped from grain is also used figuratively for anything seen as worthless?

Chaff is the scaly husk around each grain, which must come off before the grain can be used. Farmers also give the name to straw chopped very short.

Which unit of land was traditionally reckoned as the area a team of oxen could plough in a single day?

An acre was first pictured as a long narrow strip, forty perches by four, rather than a square. It is now fixed at 4,840 square yards.

Which word for a castrated ram gave English a term for a trendsetter, after the bell hung on a flock's leader?

A wether chosen to lead wore a bell so the shepherd could follow the flock by ear even when it was out of sight, and bellwether has meant a leader ever since.

The strip at each end of a planted field, where machinery turns around, is known by which term?

A headland is the first part of a field to be harvested, to limit crop damage, and its soil ends up more compacted because it carries the most traffic.

Cattle of breeds such as the Aberdeen Angus, which naturally grow no horns, are described by which term?

Polled stock are hornless by breeding, though the word also covers horned animals that were disbudded young. Angus bulls are used to pass the trait on for easier handling.

Under which system, common in the post-Civil War US South, did tenants pay the landowner with part of the harvest?

Sharecropping typically cost the cropper one-half to two-thirds of the harvest, handed to the landowner in return for the land and supplies.

Which word, built on the Latin for bee, names the place where a keeper's hives are kept?

An apiary is also called a bee yard. The word was first recorded in 1654, and the people who tend one are apiarists.

Which name is given to a chicken bred and raised for meat, usually slaughtered at only a few weeks old?

A broiler from a modern commercial strain reaches slaughter weight at four to six weeks, while slower-growing breeds take about fourteen.

Which chef opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971, a restaurant credited with pioneering the farm-to-table movement?

Alice Waters built the menu on fresh, seasonal food grown nearby, and later founded the Edible Schoolyard programme at a Berkeley middle school.

Which word, coined by Jessica Prentice, describes someone who tries to eat only food grown close to home?

A locavore often draws the line at food available within a 100-mile radius of home.

In community-supported agriculture, or CSA, what do members pay for up front that brings a regular box of produce?

A harvest share means members carry some of the risk of farming alongside the grower, so a poor season is felt by both sides.

The Slow Food movement grew out of a 1986 campaign against which chain opening a branch in the heart of Rome?

McDonald's had chosen a site beside one of Rome's best-loved landmarks, and the protest group Carlo Petrini founded in response has since spread worldwide.

Which phrase, coined by Professor Tim Lang, measures how far what we eat travels from producer to consumer?

Food miles first appeared in print in a report on the dangers of long-distance transport. Lang wanted a simple way to show shoppers the hidden costs of what they buy.

Which American author traced four meals back to their sources in the 2006 book The Omnivore's Dilemma?

Michael Pollan followed industrial, organic and foraged food chains from their source to a finished meal, and came away critical of the American way of eating.

Which borrowed word describes how a place's soil, climate and farming methods shape the character of what grows there?

Terroir underpins the appellation rules of Burgundy and other regions, which is why labels there often name the vineyard more prominently than the grape.

Which name was given to the home vegetable plots that Americans planted to boost food supplies during both world wars?

Victory gardens came to supply around one third of the vegetables grown in the United States, and Eleanor Roosevelt planted one on the White House lawn in 1943.

Which phrase, popularised by London chef Fergus Henderson's 1999 cookbook, describes cooking every part of an animal?

Nose to tail eating gave Henderson his reputation for offal and neglected cuts, with recipes for trotters, tripe, kidneys and chitterlings.

Which California city rebranded itself in 2012 as the nation's farm-to-fork capital, citing its surrounding farms?

Sacramento repainted a prominent water tower with the new title in 2017, dropping its old City of Trees boast, until a petition signed by 4,000 residents won space for both slogans.

Which sugar in cow's milk can roughly two in three people worldwide not fully digest as adults?

Lactose has to be split into glucose and galactose by the enzyme lactase in the small intestine. People short of that enzyme are least common among Northern Europeans.

Which US state has stamped the nickname America's Dairyland on its licence plates since 1940?

Wisconsin is the only state that makes its cheese and butter makers hold a licence, and it turns out about a quarter of America's cheese.

Which process breaks the fat in milk into tiny globules so that it no longer rises and collects at the top?

Homogenisation spreads the shrunken fat globules evenly through the milk, which lets dairies sell it at any fat level without a layer forming in the bottle.

Which enzyme mixture, traditionally taken from the stomachs of calves, is added to milk to curdle it for cheesemaking?

Rennet from calves has become rare in American cheese, because most makers now use the same curdling enzyme produced by genetically engineered microbes instead.

Elsie the Cow, a cartoon mascot created in 1936, was the smiling face of which American dairy company?

Borden meant Elsie to stand for the perfect dairy product, and she outlasted the company itself, passing to its successors when it was broken up.

Which chamber of a cow's stomach, the largest, houses the microbes that ferment otherwise indigestible grass?

The rumen, also known as the paunch, is where fibre-rich roughage that a mammal's own digestive juices cannot break down gets fermented.

Milk fever, which can strike a dairy cow just after calving, is caused by low blood levels of which mineral?

Calcium pours into the new milk faster than the cow can draw it from her bones, which is why older animals are struck most often.

Fonterra, a multinational dairy co-operative owned by the farmers who supply it, is based in which country?

New Zealand's farmers created Fonterra in 2001 by merging the country's two largest dairy co-operatives with the national board that handled their exports.

Most of the methane produced in a dairy cow's gut leaves the animal's body in which way?

Belching releases most of it, because the gas forms as microbes ferment feed in the stomach. Only a small share is made further along and passed out the other end.

Which udder infection is the most common and most costly disease of dairy cattle around the world?

Mastitis usually begins when bacteria invade the teat canal and white blood cells flood into the gland, and it is potentially fatal.

Eastern Market, billed as the largest historic public market district in the United States, is in which Midwestern city?

Detroit's market district also holds what is described as the country's largest open-air flowerbed market, and it anchors the city's push for sustainable local food.