Wheat

📖 In short

Wheat is one of the most important food crops in the world. Its grains are ground into the flour we make bread, cakes, biscuits and pasta from. Hundreds of millions of people eat wheat every day.

🤩 Did you know?

A typical ear of wheat holds between 30 and 50 grains.
The endosperm makes up about 83% of a wheat grain.
More than 100 kinds of insects attack wheat.
Brown bread made from whole wheat is healthier.

🔎 Find out more

🌟 The ear

Wheat grows as a tall thin plant with an ear at the top holding lots of grains. When it ripens, the field turns from green to gold and sways in the wind like a sea of gold.

🔍 Inside the grain

A grain of wheat has three parts: the bran, which is the outer coat; the tiny germ, from which a new plant grows; and the endosperm, which makes up most of the grain and gives white flour.

💡 One of the oldest crops

Wheat was one of the first plants people grew, about ten thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent in Iraq and the Levant, and people began to settle and build villages.

🎯 Harvesting then and now

Long ago farmers cut wheat with a sickle, then threshed it to separate the grain. Today a huge machine called a combine harvester does it all at once.