Ukraine · #3 crop The yellow field of Ukraine’s flag is traditionally read as a field of grain under a blue sky
Common wheat
Triticum aestivum · locally: пшениця (pszenycia)
The “breadbasket of Europe” – Ukrainian wheat from the black-earth lands feeds millions of people from North Africa to Asia.
An annual grass 60–120 cm tall, producing ears with several grains in each spikelet. It is a hexaploid – it arose several thousand years ago from a spontaneous cross between emmer wheat and a wild grass, goatgrass. It is grown in winter forms, sown in autumn, and spring forms. High-gluten wheat flour is the basis of bread, pasta and baked goods, and wheat – along with maize and rice – is the most important cereal in the world.
Significance in the country
Its black earth has made Ukraine one of the world’s largest grain exporters. Wheat here also carries the weight of memory: ears of wheat held by a little girl are the central motif of the Kyiv memorial to the victims of the Great Famine of 1932–1933.
Where it grows
Grown across almost the whole country, most intensively on the black earth of the steppe and forest-steppe – in Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv oblasts; less often in the Carpathians and Polesia.
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