Cereal

Oats, barley, and some products made from them

Read about Cereal in the Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture

Cereals (Ceres, goddess of agriculture). The agricultural grains, properly those of the grass family: maize or Indian corn, kafir, wheat, emmer, spelt, rice, oats, barley, rye, sorghum (for grain); popularly held to include buckwheat, but not accurately so. Consult Vol. II, Cyclo. Amer. Agric. The above text is from the Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture. It may be out of date, but still contains valuable and interesting information which can be incorporated into the remainder of the article. Click on "Collapse" in the header to hide this text.

List of Cereals

Major grains^wp. All but buckwheat and quinoa are true grasses (these two are pseudocereals).

Grain
Maize	A staple food of peoples in North America, South America, and Africa and of livestock worldwide; often called "corn" or "Indian corn" in North America, Australia, and New Zealand.
Wheat	The primary cereal of temperate regions
Rice	The primary cereal of tropical regions
Barley	Grown for malting and livestock on land too poor or too cold for wheat
Sorghums	Important staple food in Asia and Africa and popular worldwide for livestock
Millets	A group of similar but distinct cereals that form an important staple food in Asia and Africa.
Oats	Formerly the staple food of Scotland and popular worldwide for livestock
Rye	Important in cold climates
Triticale	Hybrid of wheat and rye, grown similarly to rye
Buckwheat	Used in Europe and Asia. Major uses include various pancakes and groats
Fonio	Several varieties of which are grown as food crops in Africa
Quinoa	Ancient pseudocereal, grown in the Andes

Maize, wheat and rice, between them, accounted for 87% of all grain production, worldwide, and 43% of all food calories in 2003. Other grains that are important in some places, but that have little production globally (and are not included in FAO statistics), include:

• Teff, popular in Ethiopia but scarcely known elsewhere
• Wild rice, grown in small amounts in North America
• Grain amaranth, ancient pseudocereal, formerly a staple crop of the Aztec Empire
• Kañiwa, close relative of quinoa

Several other species of wheat have also been domesticated, some very early in the history of agriculture:

• Spelt, a close relative of common wheat
• Einkorn, a wheat species with a single grain
• Emmer, one of the first crops domesticated in the Fertile Crescent
• Durum, the only tetraploid species of wheat currently cultivated, used to make semolina

Source: Wikipedia^wp