Grain Production in the Achaemenid Empire

The Achaemenid Empire contained some of the best grain-rich regions of the known world: The entire Fertile Crescent, including Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Black Sea regions.

The varieties of grains cultivated at scale werefew, until the lands permanently irrigated land was greatly extended, a process which occurred well after the classical period.

There are eight grains which play a major role as human food in the world: wheat, rye, barley, oats, corn, millet, sorghum, and rice, but most of them were not cultivated, or cultivated only as secondary crops in antiquity in the Mediterranean region, due to the seasonality of precipitation. The main crops were barley and wheat. Logistic calculations, therefore, will involve only these two grains, since they represent well both the food yield capacity of harvest areas and the caloric content of cereals. The fact is, however, that there was more food other than cereals. Since the Neolithic Agricultoral Revolution, more than three hundred generations learned how plants grew and developed, and in additon to the domestication of greains, had also established a great variety of other plant food sources: fruits and vegetables, like beans, lentils, grapes and figs, which no doubt complemented the basic grain rations or populations and armies. If cereal was insufficient at times, there would have been other crops to rely on during a temporary scarcity.

In antiquity there seems to have been general agreement that wheat was superior to barley for food, from Galen to Sphocles, Aristophanes and Aristotle. Barley wine, on the other hand was the only reason in my humble opinion why barley was given any harvest land at all next to wheat: BEER. A powerful lure to

How many acres of wheat grow in Kansas? In 2017, Kansas ranked No. 1 in wheat production, according to the 2017 Census of Agriculture. Kansas farms produced 319 million bushels of wheat from 7 million harvested acres (28,328 km2247.105, accounting for almost 18 percent of all wheat grown in the United States.