hops - Farmageddon

Hops are the female flower clusters (commonly called seed cones or strobiles), of a hop species, Humulus lupulus.
Used primarily as a flavoring and stability agent in beer, to which they impart a bitter, tangy flavor, hops are also used for various purposes in other beverages and herbal medicine. Hops were cultivated continuously around the 8th or 9th century AD in Bohemian gardens in the Hallertau district of Bavaria and other parts of Europe. However, the first documented use of hops in beer as a bittering agent is from the 11th century.

Hops are used extensively in brewing for their many purported benefits, including balancing the sweetness of the malt with bitterness, contributing a variety of desirable flavors and aromas, and having an antibiotic effect that favors the activity of brewer's yeast over less desirable microorganisms. Historically, it is believed that traditional herb combinations for ales were abandoned when it was noticed that ales made with hops were less prone to spoilage.

The hop plant, which has been called a "wicked and pernicious weed", is a vigorous climbing herbaceous perennial, usually trained to grow up strings in a field called a hopfield, hop garden, or hop yard when grown commercially.
Important production centers are the Hallertau in Germany (which, in 2006, had more hop-growing area than any other country on Earth), the Yakima, Washington and Willamette, Oregon valleys, and western Canyon County, Idaho.
The principal production centers in the UK are in Kent and Worcestershire. Essentially all of the harvested hops are used in beer making.

Sonoma County in California was, pre-mechanization, a major US producer of hops. As in other hop-growing regions, the labor-intensive harvesting work involved large numbers of migrant workers traveling from other parts of the state or elsewhere for the annual hop harvest. During the Great Depression, many workers were migrant laborers from Oklahoma and the surrounding region who had recently come to California. The remnants of this significant hop industry are still noticeable in the form of old hop kilns that survive in Sonoma County.