How does food get from a farm to your plate? You may have heard that food just appears at the grocery store. In fact, food is grown or raised on farms first. Farms grow crops and raise animals. Fruits and vegetables are food crops that farmers grow. A dairy farm milks cows to get milk, and some chickens on farms, called layers, lay eggs. Food travels from a farm to a store and then to your home, and trucks carry food from farms to markets.

About 11,000 years ago, people began learning how to grow grains and roots and settled into a life based on farming. Adapting wild plants and animals for people to use is called domestication. The Fertile Crescent, named for its rich soils, is found in the Middle East. Wheat, corn (maize) and rice are grains that people around the world grow and eat, and flour for bread comes from wheat grain.

A crop needs a seed, soil and water. A seed has a seed coat that protects it and a food reserve that feeds the baby plant inside. Seeds need water and warmth to start growing, and plants grow in soil, which gives them water, nutrients and support. Irrigation brings water to crops through pipes, canals or sprinklers instead of relying on rain alone. Irrigation water comes from groundwater pumped from aquifers or from surface water such as streams, rivers and lakes. Around 5500 B.C., farmers in Mesopotamia developed simple irrigation systems.

Farms grow many kinds of crops, and they raise animals and fish too. Crops fall into six categories by use: food, feed, fiber, oil, ornamental and industrial crops. Some crops, such as oats and alfalfa, are grown to feed farm animals. Some farm animals, such as cattle and sheep, eat grass in open fields called pastures. Some fish and shellfish are raised on farms, which is called aquaculture. Aquaculture, the breeding, rearing and harvesting of fish, shellfish and algae, can happen in marine or freshwater settings.

Many foods depend on pollination. Pollen carries a plant's male cells, and pollination helps a plant make seeds. Virtually all of the world's seed plants need to be pollinated, and bees help fruits, nuts and other foods grow by visiting flowers. You may have heard that bees only matter because they make honey. They matter for more than that. Bees make honey from the nectar of flowers and fan their wings in the hive to dry nectar into honey. Honey bees make honey to store as food for the winter, and beekeepers get extra honey because bees make more than the colony needs.

On a dairy farm, milk is cooled as soon as possible, collected in a bulk tank and then transported to a processor. In the United States, eggs are cleaned and kept cold after hens lay them. Cooling fresh produce right after harvest helps it stay good for longer. The cold chain is a series of refrigerated cooling, storage and transport steps that keeps food at the right temperature from grower to consumer.

Words to know

• domestication: adapting wild life
• irrigation: watering crops
• pollination: seed-making help
• aquaculture: farming fish