50 Fun Facts About Harvest

The English word 'harvest' comes from an Old English word that originally meant what?

Old English hærfest simply meant 'Autumn', the season, as its German cognate Herbst does today; the sense of gathering the crops came later.

The harvest moon is defined as the full moon closest to what?

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.

Why does a harvest moon low on the horizon look golden or red?

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.

The modern British Harvest Festival is traced to Rev. Robert Hawker's 1843 service in which county?

His idea spread with hymns like 'Come, ye thankful people, come' and the custom of decorating churches with home-grown produce.

Lammas, the early English harvest festival on 1 August, takes its name from what?

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.

Which writer's long letter campaign led Lincoln to make Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863?

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.

Since 1942, US Thanksgiving has been fixed on which day?

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.

Canadian Thanksgiving, a harvest thanksgiving by its 1957 proclamation, falls on which day?

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'.

Sukkot, the Jewish Feast of Booths, is described in the Torah as a festival of what?

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.

China's Moon Festival, its great harvest celebration, falls on the 15th day of which lunar month?

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.

Which pastry is traditionally eaten at China's Moon Festival, held around the September equinox?

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.

Which half-moon rice cakes are eaten at Chuseok, Korea's harvest festival?

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.

The Tamil festival Pongal is named after a dish of rice boiled with milk and jaggery until it does what?

The word pongal means 'to boil over': the rice Overflows the pot, and families shout 'Pongalo Pongal!' as it spills, a sign of abundance.

Onam, the harvest festival of Kerala, celebrates the annual return of which legendary king?

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.

Vaisakhi marks the birth of the Khalsa, founded by Guru Gobind Singh in which year?

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.

Homowo, celebrated by the Ga people of Ghana, has a name that literally means what?

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.

The cornucopia is named in Greek myth after which creature that nursed the infant Zeus?

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.

Corn dollies were traditionally woven from the last sheaf of the harvest to give a home to what?

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.

Which Roman goddess of grain and agriculture gave her name to the word 'cereal'?

Ceres, goddess of grain, gives us the word 'cereal'; her seven-day April festival, the Cerealia, included its own games, the Ludi Ceriales.

In Greek mythology, who was the goddess of the harvest and mother of Persephone?

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.

In which wealthy relative's field did Ruth glean at the barley harvest, later marrying him?

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.

What is the term for collecting leftover crops from a field after the main harvest?

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.

Before machines, grain was beaten from the stalk with which two-piece tool?

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.

The step after threshing that separates grain from chaff relied on what?

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.

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

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.

Cyrus McCormick, famous for the reaper, founded a company that became part of which corporation in 1902?

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.

Which crop is grown on more land than any other food crop in the world?

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.

Wheat was first cultivated around 9600 BC in which region?

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.

Rice is the staple food of roughly what share of the world's population?

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.

Maize was domesticated about 9,000 years ago in southern Mexico from which wild grass?

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.

Which US state grows about 95% of the pumpkins destined for processing into canned pie filling?

Illinois grows the bulk of America's processing pumpkins, and the Libby's plant at Morton, Illinois cans most of the pumpkin pie filling sold in the United States.

Cranberry beds are flooded at harvest time for what reason?

To make the berries float, growers flood the beds and knock the fruit off the vines; air pockets inside each berry carry it to the surface, where it is corralled with booms.

Which US state produced 59% of the American cranberry crop in 2021?

Wisconsin leads American cranberry growing by a wide margin, with marshes concentrated in the central part of the state, far ahead of Massachusetts, the crop's historic home.

Norman Borlaug, 'father of the Green Revolution', won which honour in 1970 for his high-yield wheat?

The Nobel Peace Prize went to Borlaug in 1970 because his dwarf, disease-resistant grain varieties lifted harvests in Mexico, India and Pakistan; he is credited with saving a billion people from starvation.

An AP editor coined 'Dust Bowl' after 'Black Sunday', a black blizzard that hit the Plains on 14 April of which year?

On 14 April 1935 a wall of dust turned day to night across Oklahoma and Texas; AP reporter Robert Geiger's dispatch the next day gave the region its name, Dust Bowl.

In which port city was the first steam-powered grain elevator built in 1842–43?

Joseph Dart and engineer Robert Dunbar built it in Buffalo, New York, where Great Lakes grain was transferred to the Erie Canal; their 'marine leg' scooped grain straight out of ships' hulls.

Which communal farm-building tradition survives largely unchanged among the Amish and Old Order Mennonites?

In the 18th and 19th centuries a barn was too big and costly for one family to build alone, so the neighbourhood turned out.

In which modern country was the oldest evidence of bread-making, about 14,500 years old, found?

Jordan is where the charred flatbread crumbs, about 14,500 years old, were found at the Natufian site of Shubayqa 1 in the Black Desert, some 4,000 years before farming began.

A sickle differs from a scythe mainly in that it is designed to be used how?

A sickle is used With one hand, the other gripping the stalks, while a scythe's long handle and blade are swung with both hands from a standing position.

Which 1600 Thomas Nashe play preserves the custom of a harvest 'lord' riding the final laden cart?

Summer's Last Will and Testament, written for performance in 1592 and printed in 1600, brings on Harvest with reapers who cry 'Hooky, hooky' as they bring the crop home.

Who built and patented the first combine harvester, in 1835?

Hiram Moore of Kalamazoo County, Michigan built and patented the first combine in 1835; early machines were hauled by teams of twenty or more horses or mules and powered by a bullwheel.

Which company introduced the first rotary combines, in 1975?

Sperry-New Holland launched the twin-rotor TR70 in 1975, the first production rotary combine, threshing grain along spinning rotors instead of a conventional cylinder and straw walkers.

Which track from Neil Young's 1972 album Harvest became his only US number-one single?

Young said the song's composition was influenced by the French tune 'Love Is Blue'. The album featured the London Symphony Orchestra on two tracks.

Which song on Neil Young's Harvest drew a famous 1974 reply record from Lynyrd Skynyrd?

Alabama, like his earlier 'Southern Man', attacked the state's racial record; Young later wrote that the song 'richly deserved the shot' Skynyrd gave him in 'Sweet Home Alabama'.

Cyrus McCormick first demonstrated his reaper in 1831 at Steeles Tavern, in which state?

Steeles Tavern lies in Rockbridge County, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, where McCormick's family had its Walnut Grove farm; he patented the reaper in 1834.

At the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition, McCormick's reaper beat whose rival machine?

Obed Hussey, a rival who had patented his own reaper in 1833, lost a head-to-head field trial to McCormick at the 1851 Great Exhibition, where McCormick's machine took a Council Medal.

The 1678 crop-circle pamphlet The Mowing-Devil reported strange news from which county?

The Mowing-Devil tells of a Hertfordshire farmer who refused a mower's price, swore the Devil should mow the field instead, and found his oats cut overnight in neat circles.

Which Japanese village on Shikoku is populated by hundreds of life-size scarecrow dolls?

Nagoro, in Tokushima Prefecture's Iya Valley, is filled with life-size dolls made by resident Ayano Tsukimi; they sit at bus stops, in fields and in the closed school's classrooms.

Which West African country celebrates Thanksgiving on the first Thursday of November?

Liberia, settled from 1822 by freed African Americans sponsored by the American Colonization Society, kept the Thanksgiving custom and marks it as a national holiday on the first Thursday of November.

Which Australian territory marks Thanksgiving on the last Wednesday of November?

Norfolk Island picked up the holiday from visiting American whaling ships in the 1890s and keeps it on the last Wednesday of November, a day earlier in the week than the American date.