Edith Kelley, age 11, of Mesa, Ariz., for her question:
WHERE DID WHEAT ORIGINATE?
Historians link the history of the development and progress of civilization to wheat. Once man constantly roamed across plains and through forests looking for food. Then he found wheat and discovered he could store the grain and eat it in winter. At last he could settle down.
No one knows exactly where or when wheat was first used as food. At first, however, it was most likely chewed and eaten as it came from the fields. It probably originated in Asia.
Scientists think the first wheat was cultivated in Asia between the Tigris and Euphrates river in a land that was then called Mesopotamia. It is now Iraq. Wheat was first grown here about 6,500 years ago.
Ancient men soon started to grind wheat and they developed ovens in which it could be cooked. It wasn't long until they also discovered that yeast would make the dough mixture rise to produce bread.
We know that wheat was an important food in ancient Palestine and Egypt. And both the Greeks and the Chinese used the product long before the time of Christ.
Wheat came to the Western Hemisphere in 1493 with Columbus on his second voyage to the West Indies. And then Cortes took the grain from Spain to Mexico in 1519 and missionaries carried it from there into what is now Arizona and California.
Wheat was first planted at Buzzards Bay, Mass., in 1602 and in the colony at Jamestown, Va., in 1618.
As civilization and growth spread west in America, wheat went along to provide food. The grain became one of the important products that later were shipped from the West to the East.
By 1860, Indiana and Illinois were the leading wheat producing states. However, wheat acreage rapidly increased in Minnesota and the Dakotas and by 1873 the acreage expanded to include Kansas and Oklahoma.
Before the 1800s, the methods of harvesting and threshing were crude. The sickle was the most common tool for about 4,000 years ¬and it was slow as a farmer walked through a field swinging a heavy tool which had a hooked blade.
Then came the scythe, which was an improvement. It had a longer, sharper blade that was fastened to a longer wooden handle.
Next the cradle was invented. Here a wooden framework with long curved fingers set parallel to the blade brought an improvement. As the stalks of wheat were cut, they fell together on the cradle's frame. As the farmer swung the cradle back for another stroke, the cut wheat dropped away so that it could be tied in bundles easily.
Because he found the cradle heavy and very hard to handle, a man named Cyrus McCormick invented the reaper in the 1830s.
One hundred years ago, it took more than 64 hours to prepare the soil for planting, planting the seed and then cutting and thrashing one acre of wheat. Now the same amount of work takes less than three hours.
In 1939, it took 47 hours to produce 100 bushels of wheat. Today it takes 31 hours.