97 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.

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 fixed the Second Monday in October in 1957 'for the bountiful harvest'; in the 1920s Thanksgiving had shared one November Monday with Armistice Day, until 11 November was kept for remembrance alone.

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.

Which objects are traditionally carried and displayed at China's Mid-Autumn Festival?

Lanterns of every shape are carried in processions and hung outside homes on festival night; by custom, riddles are written on them for others to solve.

Which pastry is traditionally shared at China's Mid-Autumn Festival?

Mooncakes, dense round pastries filled with lotus-seed or sweet-bean paste and often a salted egg yolk, are cut into wedges and shared among family, since the festival's full moon stands for reunion.

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, is banished to the netherworld by Vishnu's dwarf avatar Vamana in the Onam legend, but allowed to return to his people once a year, the visit Kerala celebrates.

Vaisakhi, Punjab's harvest festival, marks which Guru's founding of the Khalsa in 1699?

Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Guru, chose the Vaisakhi harvest gathering of 1699 to turn his followers into the Khalsa, a brotherhood of 'soldier saints', giving an old spring festival a new meaning.

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.

In one Greek myth, the cornucopia came from which creature that nursed the infant Zeus?

A goat, Amalthea, suckled the infant Zeus hidden on Crete in this telling, and her broken horn became the cornucopia, the horn of plenty that never ran empty; other versions make Amalthea a nymph.

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 gave her name to the largest body in the asteroid belt?

Ceres, goddess of grain, lent her name to the dwarf planet found in 1801 and to the word 'cereal'; at her April festival, Ovid says, foxes were let loose with burning torches tied to them.

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 the Book of Ruth, which wealthy relative let Ruth gather grain in his barley field, then married her?

Boaz, a wealthy kinsman of Ruth's late husband's family, let her gather grain behind his reapers 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 is named for combining reaping, threshing and which other harvest job?

Winnowing, the cleaning of chaff from threshed grain, is the other 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.

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.

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.

Barn raising survives largely unchanged among which religious community?

The Amish still turn out by the hundred to raise a neighbour's barn in a single day, working unpaid because each family knows the favour will be returned when its own need comes.

In which modern country was the oldest evidence of bread-making, over 14,000 years old, found?

Jordan is where charred flatbread crumbs over 14,000 years old were found at Shubayqa 1, a Natufian site in the Black Desert, baked by hunter-gatherers 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 Flemish painter's 1565 panel The Harvesters shows peasants reaping and eating lunch under a pear tree?

Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Harvesters in a cycle of the seasons for an Antwerp merchant; five panels survive, and this one shows peasants at work and at lunch with no religious story at all.

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.

In winemaking, what term names the year in which a wine's grapes were harvested?

Vintage comes, via Old French, from the Latin vindemia, the grape-gathering itself; Port houses still 'declare' a vintage only in their best years.

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

Heart of Gold topped the US chart in 1972 with James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt on backing vocals; Young later wrote that it put him 'in the middle of the road', so he 'headed for the ditch'.

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 near his family's Shenandoah Valley farm, in which state?

Virginia: the demonstration was at Steeles Tavern in Rockbridge County, near the family's Walnut Grove farm; he patented the reaper in 1834 but sold none at first, as it could not cope with varying conditions.

Which bird, fattened on the stubble left after harvest, was the traditional Michaelmas dinner in Britain?

Goose was the Michaelmas dish: birds turned out on the stubble fields were well fattened by late September, and eating one was said to keep a family from want for the next year.

A 1678 English pamphlet claimed which figure mowed a farmer's oats into neat circles overnight?

The Devil: in The Mowing-Devil, a Hertfordshire farmer swore he would rather the Devil mowed his oats than pay a labourer's price, and the pamphlet says he woke to find them cut; it is often cited as an early crop-circle report.

In Nagoro, a village on Japan's Shikoku island, what now outnumber the residents?

Life-size dolls: Tsukimi Ayano made the first, a scarecrow in her father's likeness, after moving home to care for him; by 2015 her figures outnumbered the few dozen villagers several times over.

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 and keeps it on the last Wednesday of November, a day earlier in the week than the American date.

Which Native nation, led by Massasoit, joined the Plymouth colonists at their 1621 harvest feast?

Wampanoag men, some ninety of them, feasted with the colonists for three days and went out to kill five deer for the table.

Kwanzaa takes its name from a Swahili phrase, matunda ya kwanza, that names which part of a harvest?

The first fruits ceremonies of southern Africa, among them the Zulu festival Umkhosi Wokweshwama, inspired Maulana Karenga when he created the holiday in 1966.

Which Gaelic festival, marking the end of the harvest season on 1 November, shaped modern Halloween?

Samhain opened the darker half of the Gaelic year, and Irish and Scottish emigrants later carried its guising and pranks across the Atlantic.

Before pumpkins took over, Irish and Scottish Halloween lanterns were carved from which root vegetable?

Turnips lit the way for Stingy Jack, the trickster of Irish legend doomed to roam the Earth with only an ember inside a hollowed-out root.

Which costly spice is harvested by hand-picking the crimson stigmas of crocus flowers?

Saffron takes about 150,000 flowers to make a single kilogram, and the threads have to be dried quickly once they are plucked.

Which trio of crops, grown together by Indigenous peoples of North America, is known as the Three Sisters?

Corn, beans and squash help one another: the stalks give the vines a trellis, the legumes feed the soil with nitrogen, and the broad leaves shade out weeds.

Which haymaking tool does the stern farmer grip in Grant Wood's 1930 painting American Gothic?

A pitchfork, its three prongs echoed in the stitching of his overalls, is held by a figure modelled on the artist's own dentist, Byron McKeeby.

Which US president moved Thanksgiving a week earlier in 1939 to lengthen the Christmas shopping season?

Franklin Roosevelt's switch was mocked as Franksgiving, and the states split almost evenly over which date to keep, with three of them observing both.

In Greek myth, eating the seeds of which fruit bound Persephone to the underworld for part of each year?

Pomegranate seeds eaten in the realm of Hades tied her to him for months of every year, and the Greeks told the story to explain the seasons.

Harvestmen, arachnids often mistaken for spiders, go by what nickname in North America?

Daddy longlegs spin no webs and have no venom glands, so the old tale that they carry the deadliest bite in the animal world is false.

The Igbo people of Nigeria hold a thanksgiving festival each August for the first harvest of which crop?

Yams from the new crop are forbidden to everyone until the proper community authority has performed the ritual that opens the festival.

Crop Over, a festival born on sugar plantations at the end of the cane harvest, belongs to which island?

Barbados let the tradition lapse during the Second World War and revived it in 1974 to draw tourists, closing each year with a finale called the Grand Kadooment.

In Gujarat, the harvest festival Makar Sankranti, known locally as Uttarayan, is best known for what?

Flying kites is so central that many households buy or build theirs months ahead, and the state hosts an international festival that drew teams from 42 countries in 2012.

Lohri, the Punjabi midwinter festival tied to the sugarcane harvest, is celebrated around what?

A bonfire is lit at night while people sing of Dulla Bhatti, a Punjabi folk hero remembered for saving young women from being sold into slavery.

Bihu, a trio of yearly farming festivals with its own folk dance and songs, belongs to which Indian state?

Assam marks sowing with Bohag Bihu in April, guards the growing crop at Kati Bihu in October and feasts on the harvest at Bhogali Bihu in January.

Which Japanese custom sets out rice dumplings and pampas grass to honour the harvest moon?

Tsukimi offerings so often include taro or sweet potato as well that the night has a second name meaning the potato harvest moon.

At Niiname-sai, Japan's ancient harvest rite held every 23 November, who presents rice and sake to the gods?

The Emperor makes the offering twice, at sunset and again at dawn, and since 1948 the date has been the public holiday Labor Thanksgiving Day.

Which 29 September feast day marked the end of the harvest and the farming year in medieval England?

Michaelmas was a quarter day, when the year's accounts were settled, and the traditional dinner was a goose fattened on the stubble of the cut fields.

The full moon that follows the harvest moon, usually in October, is traditionally named after which people?

Hunters gave the October moon its name by 1710, when a London paper credited the term to country people, though it is often attributed to Native Americans.

The harvest hymn We Plough the Fields and Scatter, a British church staple, came from which language?

German poet Matthias Claudius published the words in 1782, and a shortened version later turned up as the song All Good Gifts in the musical Godspell.

What do winemakers call the grey fungus that shrivels grapes for sweet wines like Sauternes?

Noble rot was found by accident, one story goes, when a messenger bringing permission to pick reached a Rheingau estate three weeks late in 1775.

Edmond Albius, an enslaved 12-year-old on Réunion, worked out in 1841 how to hand-pollinate which crop?

Vanilla orchids had borne no pods on the island because their pollinating insect lived only in the plant's native range, and his quick trick made Réunion the top supplier for a time.

Which animals, since largely replaced by trained dogs, were traditionally used to sniff out truffles?

Pigs find them by instinct but also try to eat what they dig up, which is why dogs, with no appetite for truffles, took over the job.

Beekeepers opening a hive to harvest honey calm the colony by puffing what into the entrance?

Smoke masks the alarm scent that guard bees release and sets the colony feeding, as if it were getting ready to flee a fire.

Which country, stripping bark from its oak trunks every nine years, supplies about half the world's cork?

Portugal's cork oaks are never felled for it: a tree is about 25 years old at its first stripping and can live for some 300 years.

The coffee bean is really the seed of a fruit that growers and pickers call by what name?

A cherry usually holds two seeds pressed flat side to flat side, and the 10 to 15 percent that hold a single round one are sold as peaberries.

Mexican field workers called jimadores harvest the core of which spiky plant to make tequila?

Blue agave is trimmed with a long-handled blade called a coa until only the swollen core is left, known as the piña for its likeness to a pineapple.

Native Americans traditionally harvest wild rice from lakes by knocking the ripe seeds into what?

A canoe is poled through the stand by one person while a partner bends the stalks over the side and brushes the seeds loose with a pair of sticks.

Which Canadian province, tapping its trees as winter ends, makes about 70% of the world's maple syrup?

Quebec keeps a reserve of barrels to steady the price, and thieves drained nearly 3,000 tonnes of syrup from one of its warehouses in 2011 and 2012.

Which French red wine, bottled weeks after the grape harvest, goes on sale on the third Thursday of November?

Beaujolais Nouveau was turned into an event by its makers, who promoted the release with a race to get the first bottles to Paris.

Which inventor built the 1793 cotton gin, the machine that pulled the seeds out of newly picked fibre?

Eli Whitney hoped it would cut the labour that cotton needed, but picking became the bottleneck instead and planters bought more enslaved workers to do it.

Which insect, a destroyer of Southern cotton crops, was given a monument by the town of Enterprise in 1919?

The boll weevil forced local farmers to try other crops, which paid so well that the town thanked the pest with a statue hailing it as a herald of prosperity.

Which volcano's 1815 eruption ruined harvests across Europe and New England in the Year Without a Summer?

Tambora's ash made the summer of 1816 so cold and wet that Mary Shelley, kept indoors on a Swiss holiday, began writing Frankenstein.

In China's Four Pests campaign of 1958, wiping out which birds let locusts multiply and strip the fields?

Sparrows ate huge numbers of insects as well as seed, as an ornithologist pointed out to Party leaders, and in 1960 bed bugs took the birds' place on the list.

Threatening letters in England's 1830 riots against threshing machines bore which invented name?

Captain Swing never existed: he was the mythical figurehead of farm labourers who wrecked the machines that were putting them out of work.

British women recruited to bring in the harvest during both world wars were known by what nickname?

Land Girls were not all country-bred: more than a third came from London and the industrial cities of northern England, and the force lasted until 1950.

Which co-founder of the United Farm Workers fronted the 1960s boycott of California table grapes?

Cesar Chavez brought his union into a strike that Filipino pickers under Larry Itliong had begun in 1965, and after five years the growers signed contracts.

Which gas, given off naturally by ripe bananas, do fruit packers use to ripen produce that was picked green?

Ethylene was the first gas known to act as a hormone, and the ancient Egyptians set it off without knowing by gashing figs to make them ripen.

Ergot, the fungus behind the medieval bread poisoning called St Anthony's fire, mainly infects which cereal?

Rye is the fungus's most common host, and the lysergic acid that ergot contains later became the starting point for making LSD.

What are bound sheaves of cut grain called when they are stood on end together in the field to dry?

Stooks kept the heads of grain off the ground while it ripened and hardened, a step that modern machines and powered driers made unnecessary.

Which Renaissance painter's The Harvesters shows some field hands eating while others cut the grain?

Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted it for an Antwerp banker as one of six scenes of the changing year, five of which survive.

Which tri-coloured Halloween sweet was first sold in the 1880s under the name Chicken Feed?

Candy corn is credited to George Renninger of Philadelphia's Wunderle Candy Company and was later taken up by Goelitz, the firm that became Jelly Belly.

Which composer's Four Seasons has a concerto that opens with villagers dancing to celebrate the harvest?

Antonio Vivaldi published each concerto with a sonnet spelling out its scenes, and he marked the slow movement after the dancing as the drunkards falling asleep.

The farming game series Harvest Moon inspired which 2016 indie hit, built over five years by one developer?

Stardew Valley began as Eric Barone's fan-made answer to a series he felt had declined, and he worked as a theatre usher in Seattle while he made it.

Which 1973 British horror film sends a policeman to the island of Summerisle, where the harvest has failed?

The Wicker Man reveals that the islanders offer a human sacrifice to their gods whenever the crops fail, and that the visitor, not the missing girl, was always the intended victim.

In The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family leaves which Dust Bowl state to seek farm work in California?

Oklahoma gave the migrants their nickname, Okies, and the novel was publicly banned and burned in places before it won the Pulitzer.

Which bright star in the constellation Virgo has a Latin name meaning an ear of grain?

Spica is thought to be the star that led the Greek astronomer Hipparchus to discover precession, the slow wobble of Earth's axis.

Some scholars read the golden hair of which Norse goddess, shorn by Loki, as a field of ripe grain?

Sif, the wife of Thor, got a new head of hair made of gold after he forced the trickster to replace it, and the errand to the dwarfs produced five more treasures for the gods.

Dożynki, a harvest festival with a nationwide presidential edition since 1927, is celebrated in which country?

Poland's festival centres on a wreath woven from the last stalks cut, and in many regions the grain from it is the first set aside as seed for next year.

Which US state's university teams are the Cornhuskers, named after workers who stripped harvested ears by hand?

Nebraska's teams had been the Bugeaters until a sportswriter who hated that name began using the new one in 1899, and the university adopted it a year later.