Wheat is a type of grass grown all over the world for its highly nutritious and useful grain. It is one of the top three most produced crops in the world, along with corn and rice. Wheat has been cultivated for over 10,000 years and probably originates in the Fertile Crescent, along with other staple crops. A wide range of wheat products are made by humans, including most famously flour, which is made from the grain itself.
Today, wheat is a grass that grows between two and four feet (½ to 1 ¼ meters) tall. The physical appearance of the grain is familiar to most consumers, with a long stalk that terminates in a tightly formed cluster of plump kernels enclosed by a beard of bristly spikes. Wheat is an annual, which means that at the end of each year, fields must be plowed and prepared again to grow the grass.
Ancestral wheats probably looked very different, with much smaller kernels. The early domesticators of wheat obviously wanted to select for plants with particularly large kernels, since more nutrition could be eked out from each stalk. Because wheat is generally a self pollinating plant, each plant tends to produce clones of itself. When farmers want to hybridize a wheat strain, they must physically pollinate the different plants. Farmers blending wheat for various purposes usually combine different seeds at harvest time and spread them evenly over the field.