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Harvesting a cereal with a combine harvester accompanied by a tractor and trailer. Cereal grains: (top) pearl millet, rice, barley (middle) sorghum, maize, oats (bottom) millet, wheat, rye, triticale. A cereal is a grass cultivated for its edible grain. Cereals are the world's largest crops, and are therefore staple foods.
In the grass family, a grain (narrowly defined) is a caryopsis, a fruit with its wall fused on to the single seed inside, belonging to a cereal such as wheat, maize, or rice. More broadly, in agronomy and commerce, seeds or fruits from other plant families are called grains if they resemble cereal caryopses.
It includes the cereal grasses, bamboos, the grasses of natural grassland and species cultivated in lawns and pasture. The latter are commonly referred to collectively as grass. With around 780 genera and around 12,000 species, [4] the Poaceae is the fifth-largest plant family, following the Asteraceae, Orchidaceae, Fabaceae and Rubiaceae. [5]
Grains can be consumed in a variety of ways, all of which require husking and cooking, including whole, rolled, puffed, or ground into flour. Many cereals are present or past staple foods, providing a large fraction of the calories in the places in which they are eaten. Today, cereals provide almost half of all calories consumed in the world. [3]
Millets and their wild ancestors, such as barnyard grass and panic grass, were also cultivated in Japan during the Jōmon period sometime after 4000 BC. [30] [28] In the Zhengluo region of China, two millet species (foxtail millet and proso millet) were grown, enabling the people to survive the cooling of the global climate around 2200 BC. [31]
Barley (Hordeum vulgare), a member of the grass family, is a major cereal grain grown in temperate climates globally. It was one of the first cultivated grains; it was domesticated in the Fertile Crescent around 9000 BC, giving it nonshattering spikelets and making it much easier to harvest. Its use then spread throughout Eurasia by 2000 BC ...
Sorghum bicolor, commonly called sorghum [2] (/ ˈ s ɔːr ɡ ə m /) and also known as great millet, [3] broomcorn, [4] guinea corn, [5] durra, [6] imphee, [7] jowar, [8] or milo, [9] is a species in the grass genus Sorghum cultivated for its grain. The grain is used as food by humans, while the plant is used for animal feed and ethanol ...
Rye (Secale cereale) is a grass grown extensively as a grain, a cover crop and a forage crop. It is grown principally in an area from Eastern and Northern Europe into Russia. It is much more tolerant of cold weather and poor soil than other cereals, making it useful in those regions; its vigorous growth suppresses weeds and provides abundant forage for animals early in the yea