The Crops We Elevate
About eight acres out of every ten which are used for Heavy Duty Growing tray crops 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 finally develop into 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 different crops besides vegetables. Almost none of these crops is anyfactor just like the crops that our prehistoric ancestors raised. Of their day, most plants grew wild on earth. For instance the biggest crop of our western world, wheat, was simply tall wild grasses waving on the hillsides. The traditional Egyptians, in all probability a minimum of ten thousand years ago, discovered that the kernels of wheat would make bread. They seen which vegetation would develop greatest and saved the seeds from these plants and gradually improved the standard of the wheat they grew.
The Chinese, and other Orientals, did the same factor with rice. The American Indians did the identical thing with maize, the plant that we call corn. In the middle of hundreds of years, the food vegetation that got here to be raised have been nearly totally completely different from the original plant that had been eaten by the earliest men. We're nonetheless doing the identical things, however now the experiments are made by scientists in laboratories, they usually take years instead of hundreds of years. The same sort of development has spread different plants everywhere in the world when as soon as 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. However explorers, visiting Asia, ate the oranges and preferred them, and took the seeds back house to be planted.
Right this moment more oranges are grown in California and Florida than anywhere else on the earth, and they are higher oranges-larger, sweeter, juicier-but they by no means grew on this country until the seeds were brought in from abroad. America has made its gift of new food crops to the world. Corn was malestioned above. Potatoes were not recognized earlier than America was discovered, but the vegetation were taken to Europe and became so a lot better identified over there that we call one in all these native American plants by the name of one other nation-Irish potatoes-because the Irish people raised so lots of them at one time. In Mexico and South America, there was a plant that was utterly strange to anybody who had never been there before. We now call this plant the tomato. It was so unusual that it took a few years to persuade individuals from other countries that it was even safe to eat. Men not only learned find out how to improve the crops they knew, they realized additionally to create new plants.
The Chinese, and other Orientals, did the same factor with rice. The American Indians did the identical thing with maize, the plant that we call corn. In the middle of hundreds of years, the food vegetation that got here to be raised have been nearly totally completely different from the original plant that had been eaten by the earliest men. We're nonetheless doing the identical things, however now the experiments are made by scientists in laboratories, they usually take years instead of hundreds of years. The same sort of development has spread different plants everywhere in the world when as soon as 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. However explorers, visiting Asia, ate the oranges and preferred them, and took the seeds back house to be planted.
Right this moment more oranges are grown in California and Florida than anywhere else on the earth, and they are higher oranges-larger, sweeter, juicier-but they by no means grew on this country until the seeds were brought in from abroad. America has made its gift of new food crops to the world. Corn was malestioned above. Potatoes were not recognized earlier than America was discovered, but the vegetation were taken to Europe and became so a lot better identified over there that we call one in all these native American plants by the name of one other nation-Irish potatoes-because the Irish people raised so lots of them at one time. In Mexico and South America, there was a plant that was utterly strange to anybody who had never been there before. We now call this plant the tomato. It was so unusual that it took a few years to persuade individuals from other countries that it was even safe to eat. Men not only learned find out how to improve the crops they knew, they realized additionally to create new plants.