Food and Farming

Where Farming Began

For most of human history, people hunted animals and gathered wild plants. Then, starting about 12,000 to 11,000 years ago, people in several places began to plant seeds and keep animals. Over many generations, they saved seeds from the best plants. Slowly the plants changed. Wheat kept its grains instead of dropping them. Wild animals became calmer and easier to keep. This slow change is called domestication.

A place where farming began on its own is called an agricultural hearth. Scientists now think farming started separately in several hearths, not in one place that taught everyone else.

Some foods had more than one start. Pigs, for example, were tamed both in Southwest Asia and in China. The dates for Ethiopia and for some African crops are less certain, because fewer sites have been dug and studied.

The Columbian Exchange

For thousands of years, the Americas and Afro-Eurasia (Africa, Europe and Asia) grew different foods. That changed after Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic in 1492. Ships, many from Spain and Portugal, began carrying plants, animals and people both ways. Historians call this the Columbian Exchange.

The exchange reshaped meals everywhere. Tomatoes from the Americas became part of Italian food. Chili peppers spread to India and Thailand. Potatoes became a main food in Ireland and much of Europe. Cassava, first grown in South America, is now a key food in Africa. In the other direction, wheat, cattle and horses changed farming and travel in the Americas. Sugarcane and coffee became huge plantation crops there.

The exchange also had a terrible side. Diseases such as smallpox killed a large share of Indigenous people in the Americas. Plantations of sugar and other crops were worked by enslaved Africans who were taken across the Atlantic by force.

Kinds of Farming

Geographers often sort farming into two big groups. In subsistence farming, a family grows food mostly to feed itself. In commercial farming, farmers grow crops or raise animals mainly to sell. Many farms mix both. Here are some common types:

• Shifting cultivation. Farmers clear a small plot in a tropical forest, grow crops for a few years, then move on and let the soil rest. It needs a lot of land for few people.
• Nomadic herding. Herders move with camels, goats, sheep or cattle to find fresh grass and water. It works in dry lands, like the Sahel, and cold lands, like Mongolia's grasslands.
• Intensive rice paddies. In wet parts of South, East and Southeast Asia, families grow rice in small flooded fields. They use lots of work on little land, and some fields give two or three harvests a year.
• Plantations. Large farms, mostly in the tropics, grow one cash crop, such as bananas, coffee, cacao, oil palm or sugarcane, often for export.
• Mixed farming. A farm grows crops and raises animals together. Animals eat some of the crops, and their manure feeds the soil. This is common in Europe and the U.S. Corn Belt.
• Ranching. Cattle or sheep graze on huge areas of grassland, as in Argentina, Australia and the western United States.

Climate, Soil and Slope

Farmers have to work with the land they have. Three things matter a lot:

• Climate. Crops need enough warm days and enough water. Rice likes heat and lots of rain. Wheat grows well in cooler, drier places. Where the growing season is too short or too dry for crops, people often raise animals instead. To review climate zones, see Climate and Biomes.
• Soil. Rich, deep soils, like the dark grassland soils of Ukraine or the American Midwest, can grow huge grain harvests. Thin or worn-out soils need rest, manure or fertilizer.
• Slope. Machines work best on flat land. On steep hills, farmers may build terraces, which are flat steps cut into the slope, or they may graze animals instead of plowing.

Technology can stretch these limits. Greenhouses, new seeds and stored water let people farm places that once seemed too cold or too dry.

The World's Staple Foods

A staple food is one that people eat most days and that gives them much of their energy. Three grains, maize, rice and wheat, make up most of the world's grain harvest.

Not all of this becomes food on a plate. A large share of maize feeds animals or is made into fuel. Rice, by contrast, is mostly eaten by people, and almost all of it is grown in Asia. India grew about 27 percent of the world's rice in 2024 and China about 26 percent. Nigeria grew about 18 percent of the world's cassava. FAO updates past numbers when better data arrive, so totals can shift a little.

The Green Revolution

In the 1950s and 1960s, many experts feared that growing populations in Asia would face famine. Scientists, including the American plant breeder Norman Borlaug, developed new wheat and rice varieties. These short, sturdy plants gave much larger harvests when they got fertilizer and steady water. The spread of these seeds and methods is called the Green Revolution. Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

Gains

• Between 1960 and 2000, cereal harvests in developing countries roughly tripled, while farmland grew by only about 30 percent.
• India and other countries went from relying on food aid to growing most of their own grain.
• Cheaper food helped many families spend money on other needs.

Costs

• The new seeds needed lots of fertilizer, pesticide and water, which can harm soil, rivers and health when overused.
• Farmers planted fewer kinds of crops, so many local varieties were lost.
• Gains were uneven. Farmers with water and money gained most. By 1998, modern seeds covered about 82 percent of grain land in Asia but only about 27 percent in Africa.

Researchers still debate how to keep the gains while cutting the costs. Many now work on seeds that handle drought and heat, and on crops that Africa's farmers grow, such as cassava and sorghum.

Farms Big and Small

There are roughly 570 million farms in the world, according to a widely used estimate from FAO researchers. Most are small: the majority are under 2 hectares, about the size of three soccer fields. Small farms like these grow roughly one third of the world's food. These small farms are often run by families, and many are in Asia and Africa.

In richer countries, the trend has gone the other way. Tractors and combines let one farmer work far more land, so many small farms joined into bigger ones, and fewer people farm.

U.S. farm numbers peaked at about 6.8 million in 1935. By 2024, there were about 1.88 million farms, with an average size of 466 acres. Land in farms has shrunk only a little, so the same land is shared among fewer, larger farms.

Hunger and Food Security

Food security means that all people, at all times, can get enough safe and healthy food. The world grows enough calories to feed everyone. Hunger usually comes from poverty, conflict, bad weather or high prices, not from a lack of food on Earth.

Every year, five UN agencies publish The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, or SOFI. The 2026 edition estimates that about 645 million people, 7.8 percent of the world, faced hunger in 2025. The real number could be anywhere from about 608 to 696 million, because hunger is hard to measure. The share has fallen for three years in a row, from 8.6 percent in 2022.

A wider measure counts people who sometimes had to skip meals or eat less healthy food. About 2.1 billion people, roughly 1 in 4, were in this group in 2025, down from about 29 percent in 2020. Progress is uneven. Africa now has more hungry people than any other region, about 309 million, or 1 in 5 Africans. Common ways to fight hunger include helping small farmers grow more, school meals and warning people early when a drought is coming. The report expects about 510 to 520 million people may still face hunger in 2030.

Activity: What's on Your Plate?

Pick a meal you ate this week. List each ingredient, then use the hearth table above to find where it first came from. Here are two examples:

Then mark your ingredients on a world map. How many hearths did your one meal draw on? Most meals mix foods from at least two continents, thanks to the Columbian Exchange and trade.

Links to Other Units

• People and the Environment: how farming uses water and changes land.
• Resources and Trade: how countries buy and sell food and other goods.
• Development and Quality of Life: why fewer people farm as countries develop.

Game: Where Did It Start?

Each round names a food plant or animal. Tap the number on the map where it was first farmed or tamed. Use the hearth map above if you get stuck.

Quiz: Food and Farming

Ten questions. Choose one answer for each, then check your score. You can try as many times as you like.

Credits

Written by Marco for Jugami's World Geography course. The maps and charts are original SVG illustrations made for this page from the data in the sources. Land outlines come from Natural Earth (public domain). Domestication dates are rounded and approximate.