ETYM Old Eng. crop, croppe, craw, top of a plant, harvest, AS. crop, cropp, craw, top, bunch, ear of corn.
(agriculture) Any plant product grown or harvested for human use. Over 80 crops are grown worldwide, providing people with the majority of their food and supplying fibers, rubber, pharmaceuticals, dyes, and other materials. Crops grown for export are cash crops. A catch crop is one grown in the interval between two main crops.
There are four main groups of crops. Food crops provide the bulk of people’s food worldwide. The main types are cereals, roots, pulses (peas, beans), vegetables, fruits, oil crops, tree nuts, sugar, and spices. Cereals make the largest contribution to human nutrition. Forage crops are those such as grass and clover which are grown to feed livestock. Forage crops cover a greater area of the world than food crops. Grasses, which dominate this group, form the world’s most abundant crop, consisting mostly of wild species grown in an unimproved state. Fiber crops produce vegetable fibers. Temperate areas produce flax and hemp, but the most valuable fiber crops are cotton, jute, and sisal, which are grown mostly in the tropics. Cotton dominates fiber-crop production. Miscellaneous crops include tobacco, rubber, ornamental flowers, and plants that produce perfumes, pharmaceuticals, and dyes.
1. The stock or handle of a whip.
2. The yield from plants in a single growing season; SYN. harvest.

In birds, the thin-walled enlargement of the digestive tract between the esophagus and stomach. It is an effective storage organ especially in seed-eating birds; a pigeon's crop can hold about 500 cereal grains. Digestion begins in the crop, by the moisturizing of food. A crop also occurs in insects and annelid worms.

1. To cut short (said of hair); SYN. cut short.
2. To feed as in a meadow or pasture; SYN. browse, graze, range, pasture.
3. To let (animals) feed in a field or pasture or meadow; SYN. graze, pasture.
4. To yield crops, of land.

In computer graphics, to cut off part of an image, such as unneeded sections of a graphic or extra white space around the borders. As in preparing photographs or illustrations for traditional printing, cropping is used to refine or clean up a graphic for placement in a document.