the crops we raise

About eight acres out of every ten that are used for growing plants in agri­culture in the United States are used to grow food. Some of this food is for us to eat. Some of it is to feed livestock, which will eventually become meat or will give milk or will lay eggs. The other two acres are used for crops like cotton, from which our clothes are made; or tobacco, or trees for fruit and nuts, or for other plants besides vege­tables. Almost none of these crops is any­thing like the crops that our prehistoric ancestors raised. In their day, most plants grew wild on earth. For example the biggest crop of our western world, wheat, was simply tall wild grasses wav­ing on the hillsides. The ancient Egyp­tians, probably at least ten thousand years ago, discovered that the kernels of wheat would make bread. They noticed which plants would grow best and saved the seeds from those plants and gradu­ally improved the quality of the wheat they grew.

The Chinese, and other Ori­entals, did the same thing with rice. The American Indians did the same thing with maize, the plant that we call corn. In the course of hundreds of years, the food plants that came to be raised were almost entirely different from the origi­nal plant that had been eaten by the earliest men. We are still doing the same things, but now the experiments are made by scientists in laboratories, and they take years instead of hundreds of years. The same kind of development has spread different plants all over the world when once they grew in only a few parts of the world. There was a time when no one outside of Asia had ever heard of oranges. But explorers, visiting Asia, ate the oranges and liked them, and took the seeds back home to be planted.

Today more oranges are grown in California and Florida than anywhere else in the world, and they are better oranges—bigger, sweeter, juicier—but they never grew in this country until the seeds were brought in from abroad. America has made its gift of new food plants to the world. Corn was men­tioned above. Potatoes were not known before America was discovered, but the plants were taken to Europe and became so much better known over there that we call one of these native American plants by the name of another country—Irish potatoes—because the Irish people raised so many of them at one time. In Mexico and South America, there was a plant that was completely strange to anyone who had never been there before. We now call this plant the tomato. It was so unusual that it took many years to per­suade people from other countries that it was even safe to eat. Men not only learned how to improve the plants they knew, they learned also to create new plants.