Domestication of Plants

Domestication is the deliberate process by which a wild plant species is brought under human control and gradually reshaped — through careful selection, genetic alteration and everyday handling — into a form that serves people better. Domesticated crops become renewable sources of food and other benefits that can be maintained generation after generation, unlike foraging from the wild. The process brings about a fairly consistent set of changes in the plant: it becomes adapted to a wider range of environments and geography, flowers and fruits more uniformly and simultaneously, stops shattering or scattering its seed naturally (so the harvest is not lost before it is gathered), produces larger fruit and seed, may shift from a perennial to an annual life cycle, changes its breeding system, yields more, becomes more resistant to disease and pests, can develop seedless (parthenocarpic) fruit, and often improves in colour, appearance, palatability and nutr …