Cereal

Cereals provide food eaten directly as whole grains, usually cooked, or they are ground to flour and made into bread, porridge, and other products.

The environmental harms can be mitigated by sustainable practices which reduce the impact on soil and improve biodiversity, such as no-till farming and intercropping.

Cereal grains 19,000 years old have been found at the Ohalo II site in Israel, with charred remnants of wild wheat and barley.

[1] During the same period, farmers in China began to farm rice and millet, using human-made floods and fires as part of their cultivation regimen.

[10] Several gods of antiquity combined agriculture and war: the Hittite Sun goddess of Arinna, the Canaanite Lahmu and the Roman Janus.

[12] During the second half of the 20th century, there was a significant increase in the production of high-yield cereal crops worldwide, especially wheat and rice, due to the Green Revolution, a technological change funded by development organizations.

[15] The strategies developed by the Green Revolution, including mechanized tilling, monoculture, nitrogen fertilizers, and breeding of new strains of seeds.

These innovations focused on fending off starvation and increasing yield-per-plant, and were very successful in raising overall yields of cereal grains, but paid less attention to nutritional quality.

[20][21] The flowers are usually hermaphroditic, with the exception of maize, and mainly anemophilous or wind-pollinated, although insects occasionally play a role.

[20][22] Among the best-known cereals are maize, rice, wheat, barley, sorghum, millet, oat, rye and triticale.

[23] Some other grains are colloquially called cereals, even though they are not grasses; these pseudocereals include buckwheat, quinoa, and amaranth.

They flower only in spring as they require vernalization, exposure to cold for a specific period, fixed genetically.

[34][35] In conventional agriculture, some farmers will apply fungicides or pesticides Annual cereals die when they have come to seed, and dry up.

[25][36] In traditional agricultural systems, mostly in the Global South, harvesting may be by hand, using tools such as scythes and grain cradles.

[25] Leftover parts of the plant can be allowed to decompose, or collected as straw; this can be used for animal bedding, mulch, and a growing medium for mushrooms.

[38] If cereals are not completely dry when harvested, such as when the weather is rainy, the stored grain will be spoilt by mould fungi such as Aspergillus and Penicillium.

[40] In developing countries, processing may be traditional, in artisanal workshops, as with tortilla production in Central America.

[42] Some grains can be malted, a process of activating enzymes in the seed to cause sprouting that turns the complex starches into sugars before drying.

[55] Arable farming uses large amounts of fossil fuel, releasing greenhouse gases which contribute to global warming.

Tillage can be reduced by no-till farming, such as by direct drilling of cereal seeds, or by developing and planting perennial crop varieties so that annual tilling is not required.

Rice can be grown as a ratoon crop;[26] and other researchers are exploring perennial cool-season cereals, such as kernza, being developed in the US.

[58] Fertilizer and pesticide usage may be reduced in some polycultures, growing several crops in a single field at the same time.

For instance, beer is produced by brewing and fermenting starch, mainly from cereal grains—most commonly malted barley.

Moist grains may be treated chemically or made into silage; mechanically flattened or crimped, and kept in airtight storage until used; or stored dry with a moisture content of less than 14%.

In developed countries, cereal consumption is moderate and varied but still substantial, primarily in the form of refined and processed grains.

[80] Cereals constitute the world's largest commodities by tonnage, whether measured by production[82] or by international trade.

[85] Other disruptions, such as climate change or war related changes to supply or transportation can create further food insecurity; for example the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 disrupted Ukrainian and Russian wheat supplies causing a global food price crisis in 2022 that affected countries heavily dependent on wheat flour.

[83] Cereals are traded as futures on world commodity markets, helping to mitigate the risks of changes in price for example, if harvests fail.