Sorghum in the context of Stover

A cereal is a grass cultivated for its edible grain. Cereals are the world's largest crops, and are therefore staple foods. They include rice, wheat, rye, oats, barley, millet, and maize (corn). Edible grains from other plant families, such as amaranth, buckwheat and quinoa, are pseudocereals. Most cereals are annuals, producing one crop from each planting, though rice is sometimes grown as a perennial. Winter varieties are hardy enough to be planted in the autumn, becoming dormant in the winter, and harvested in spring or early summer; spring varieties are planted in spring and harvested in late summer. The term cereal is derived from the name of the Roman goddess of grain crops and fertility, Ceres.

Cereals were domesticated in the Neolithic around 8,000 years ago. Wheat and barley were domesticated in the Fertile Crescent. Rice and some millets were domesticated in East Asia, while sorghum and other millets were domesticated in West Africa. Maize was domesticated by Indigenous peoples of the Americas in southern Mexico about 9,000 years ago. In the 20th century, cereal productivity was greatly increased by the Green Revolution. This increase in production has accompanied a growing international trade, with some countries producing large portions of the cereal supply for other countries.

The modern combine harvester, also called a combine, is a machine designed to harvest a variety of cultivated seeds. Combine harvesters are one of the most economically important labour-saving inventions, significantly reducing the fraction of the population engaged in agriculture. Among the crops harvested with a combine are wheat, rice, oats, rye, barley, corn (maize), sorghum, millet, soybeans, flax (linseed), sunflowers and rapeseed (canola). The separated straw (consisting of stems and any remaining leaves with limited nutrients left in it) is then either chopped onto the field and ploughed back in, or laid out in rows, ready to be baled and used for bedding and cattle feed.

The name of the machine is derived from the fact that the harvester combined multiple separate harvesting operations – reaping, threshing or winnowing and gathering – into a single process around the start of the 20th century. A combine harvester still performs its functions according to those operating principles. The machine can easily be divided into four parts, namely: the intake mechanism, the threshing and separation system, the cleaning system, and finally the grain handling and storage system. Electronic monitoring assists the operator by providing an overview of the machine's operation, and the field's yield.

Millets (/ˈmɪlɪts/) are a highly varied group of small-seeded grasses, widely grown around the world as cereal crops or grains for fodder and human food. Most millets belong to the tribe Paniceae.

Millets are important crops in the semiarid tropics of Asia and Africa, especially in India, Mali, Nigeria, and Niger, with 97% of production in developing countries. The crop is favoured for its productivity and short growing season under hot dry conditions. The millets are sometimes understood to include the widely cultivated sorghum; apart from that, pearl millet is the most commonly cultivated of the millets. Finger millet, proso millet, barnyard millet, little millet, kodo millet, browntop millet and foxtail millet are other important crop species.Millets may have been consumed by humans for about 7,000 years and potentially had "a pivotal role in the rise of multi-crop agriculture and settled farming societies".

Sugarcane or sugar cane is a species of tall, perennial grass (in the genus Saccharum, tribe Andropogoneae) that is used for sugar production. The plants are 2–6 m (6–20 ft) tall with stout, jointed, fibrous stalks that are rich in sucrose, which accumulates in the stalk internodes. Sugarcanes belong to the grass family, Poaceae, an economically important flowering plant family that includes maize, wheat, rice, and sorghum, and many forage crops. It is native to New Guinea.

Sugarcane was an ancient crop of the Austronesian and Papuan people. The best evidence available today points to the New Guinea area as the site of the original domestication of Saccharum officinarum. It was introduced to Polynesia, Island Melanesia, and Madagascar in prehistoric times via Austronesian sailors. It was also introduced by Austronesian sailors to India and then to Southern China by 500 BC, via trade. The Persians and Greeks encountered the famous "reeds that produce honey without bees" in India between the sixth and fourth centuries BC. They adopted and then spread sugarcane agriculture. By the eighth century, sugar was considered a luxurious and expensive spice from India, and merchant trading spread its use across the Mediterranean and North Africa. In the 18th century, sugarcane plantations began in the Caribbean, South American, Indian Ocean, and Pacific island nations. The need for sugar crop laborers became a major driver of large migrations, some people voluntarily accepting indentured servitude and others forcibly imported as slaves.

Rice production is the fourth largest among cereals in the United States, after corn, wheat, and sorghum. Of the country's row crop farms, rice farms are the most capital-intensive and have the highest national land rental rate average. In the United States, all rice acreage requires irrigation. In 2000–09, approximately 3.1 million acres in the United States were under rice production; an increase was expected over the next decade, to approximately 3.3 million acres. USA Rice represents rice producers in the six largest rice-producing states of Arkansas, California, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Texas.

Historically, rice production in the United States was connected to agriculture using enslaved labor in the American South, first planting African rice and other kinds of rice in the marsh areas of Georgia, South Carolina, and later in the Louisiana territory and Texas, frequently in southern plantations. For some regions, this became an important profitable cash crop during the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 20th century, rice production was introduced to California, Arkansas, and the Mississippi Delta in Louisiana. Contemporary rice production in the United States includes African, Asian, and native varieties from the Americas.

Khoisan (/ˈkɔɪsɑːn/ KOY-sahn) or Khoe-Sān (pronounced [kʰoɪˈsaːn]) is an umbrella term for the various indigenous peoples of Southern Africa who traditionally speak non-Bantu languages, combining the Khoekhoen and the Sān peoples. Khoisan populations traditionally speak click languages. They are considered to be the historical communities throughout Southern Africa, remaining predominant until Bantu and European colonisation. The Khoisan have lived in areas climatically unfavourable to Bantu (sorghum-based) agriculture, from the Cape region to Namibia and Botswana, where Khoekhoe populations of Nama and Damara people are prevalent groups. Considerable mingling with Bantu-speaking groups is evidenced by prevalence of click phonemes in many Southern African Bantu languages, especially Xhosa.

Many Khoesan peoples are the descendants of an early dispersal of anatomically modern humans to Southern Africa before 150,000 years ago. (However, see below for recent work supporting a multi-regional hypothesis that suggests the Khoisan may be a source population for anatomically modern humans.) Their languages show a limited typological similarity, largely confined to the prevalence of click consonants. They are not verifiably derived from a single common proto-language, but are split among at least three separate and unrelated language families (Khoe-Kwadi, Tuu and Kxʼa). It has been suggested that the Khoekhoe may represent Late Stone Age arrivals to Southern Africa, possibly displaced by Bantu expansion reaching the area roughly between 1,500 and 2,000 years ago.

Silage is fodder made from green foliage crops which have been preserved by fermentation to the point of souring. It is fed to cattle, sheep and other ruminants. The fermentation and storage process is called ensilage, ensiling, or silaging. The exact methods vary, depending on available technology, local tradition and prevailing climate.

Silage is usually made from grass crops including maize, sorghum or other cereals, using the entire green plant (not just the grain). Specific terms may be used for silage made from particular crops: oatlage for oats, haylage for alfalfa (haylage may also refer to high dry matter silage made from hay).

Brewing is the production of beer by steeping a starch source (commonly cereal grains, the most popular of which is barley) in water and fermenting the resulting sweet liquid with yeast. It may be done in a brewery by a commercial brewer, at home by a homebrewer, or communally. Brewing has taken place since around the 6th millennium BC, and archaeological evidence suggests that emerging civilisations, including ancient Egypt, China, and Mesopotamia, brewed beer. Since the nineteenth century the brewing industry has been part of most western economies.

The basic ingredients of beer are water and a fermentable starch source such as malted barley. Most beer is fermented with a brewer's yeast and flavoured with hops. Less widely used starch sources include millet, sorghum and cassava. Secondary sources (adjuncts), such as maize (corn), rice, or sugar, may also be used, sometimes to reduce cost, or to add a feature, such as adding wheat to aid in retaining the foamy head of the beer. The most common starch source is ground cereal or "grist" – the proportion of the starch or cereal ingredients in a beer recipe may be called grist, grain bill, or simply mash ingredients.

Bagasse (/bəˈɡæs/ bə-GAS) is the dry pulpy fibrous material that remains after crushing sugarcane or sorghum stalks to extract their juice. It is used as a biofuel for the production of heat, energy, and electricity, and in the manufacture of pulp and building materials. Agave bagasse is similar, but is the material remnants after extracting blue agave sap.

A broom /bruːm/, also known as a broomstick, is a cleaning tool, consisting of usually stiff fibers (often made of materials such as plastic, glued hair, or corn husks) attached to, and roughly parallel to, a cylindrical handle, the broomstick. It is thus a variety of brush with a long handle. It is commonly used in combination with a dustpan.

A distinction is made between a "hard broom" and a "soft broom" and a spectrum in between. Soft brooms are used in some cultures chiefly for sweeping walls of cobwebs and spiders, like a "feather duster", while hard brooms are for rougher tasks like sweeping dirt off sidewalks or concrete floors, or even smoothing and texturing wet concrete. The majority of brooms are somewhere in between, suitable for sweeping the floors of homes and businesses, soft enough to be flexible and to move even light dust, but stiff enough to achieve a firm sweeping action.

Forage is a plant material (mainly plant leaves and stems) eaten by grazing livestock. Historically, the term forage has meant only plants eaten by the animals directly as pasture, crop residue, or immature cereal crops, but it is also used more loosely to include similar plants cut for fodder and carried to the animals, especially as hay or silage.

While the term forage has a broad definition, the term forage crop is used to define crops, annual or biennial, which are grown to be utilized by grazing or harvesting as a whole crop.

Panicum miliaceum is a grain crop with many common names, including proso millet, broomcorn millet, common millet, hog millet, Kashfi millet, red millet, and white millet. Archaeobotanical evidence suggests millet was first domesticated about 10,000 BP in Northern China. Major cultivated areas include Northern China, Himachal Pradesh of India, Nepal, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Middle East, Turkey, Romania, and the Great Plains states of the United States. About 500,000 acres (200,000 hectares) are grown each year. The crop is notable both for its extremely short lifecycle, with some varieties producing grain only 60 days after planting, and its low water requirements, producing grain more efficiently per unit of moisture than any other grain species tested. The name "proso millet" comes from the pan-Slavic general and generic name for millet (Serbo-Croatian: proso/просо, Czech: proso, Polish: proso, Russian: просо).

Proso millet is a relative of foxtail millet, pearl millet, maize, and sorghum within the grass subfamily Panicoideae. While all of these crops use C4 photosynthesis, the others all employ the NADP-ME as their primary carbon shuttle pathway, while the primary C4 carbon shuttle in proso millet is the NAD-ME pathway.

Baijiu (Chinese: 白酒; pinyin: báijiǔ; lit. 'white (clear) liquor'), or shaojiu (simplified Chinese: 烧酒; traditional Chinese: 燒酒; pinyin: shāojiǔ; lit. 'burning liquor'), is a colorless Chinese liquor typically coming in between 35% and 60% alcohol by volume (ABV). Each type of baijiu uses its own type of qū for fermentation to create a distinct and characteristic flavor profile.

Baijiu is a clear liquid usually distilled from fermented sorghum, although other grains may be used; some southeastern Chinese styles may employ rice and glutinous rice while other Chinese varieties may use wheat, barley, millet, or Job's tears (Chinese: 薏苡; pinyin: yìyǐ) in their mash bills. The qū starter culture used in the production of baijiu is usually made from pulverized wheat grain or steamed rice.

Huaquechula is a town in Huaquechula Municipality located in state of Puebla in central Mexico. The settlement dates back at least as far as 1110 CE although its center has moved to twice to its current location. Since its founding, it has been an agricultural community, today raising crops such as peanuts, corn and sorghum, although there are some handcrafts as well. The town is known for its traditions related to the Feast of the Cross, but even more so for its “cabo del año” altars on Day of the Dead, which are dedicated to family members who have died during the previous year. These have been declared a cultural heritage of the state of Puebla and bring tourists to the town, mostly from Puebla.