How wheat is grown and harvested

Wheat covers more farmland than any other food crop, about 219.5 million hectares in 2024.

stations: 3
things downstream: 23

The short version

Wheat is a grass sown as seed in tilled fields and left to grow until the heads turn golden and dry. A combine harvester cuts the crop, shakes the grain loose from the straw and cleans it in one pass. The grain is then dried and moved to storage, ready to be milled into flour.

Drill the seed

Seed is sown in prepared fields, in autumn for winter varieties or in spring for the spring kind. Wheat grows on a larger area of land than any other food crop.
Grow to a golden ear

Leaves unfold from the shoot one by one until the plant flowers. The last leaf to appear, the flag leaf, is denser than the others and supplies most of the carbohydrate that fills the developing ear.
Combine the crop

A combine harvester cuts the standing crop, threshes the grain out of the ears and blows the chaff away. In domesticated wheat the grains stay on the ear until threshing, but in wild wheat the ear shatters and scatters them.

End of the lineWheat Next it goes into flour, soy sauce, vodka and 2 more.

Worth repeating

World trade in wheat is greater than that of all other crops combined.
The earliest known wheat with enough gluten for yeasted bread comes from a granary at Assiros in Macedonia, dated to 1350 BC.
Wheat was first cultivated in the Fertile Crescent around 9600 BC.