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If you want to start a proper fistfight at an agricultural conference – and believe me, I've tried – simply ask which staple crop is the best. Then stand back as normally sensible men in sensible boots start hurling scientific terms at each other with the ferocity usually reserved for football hooligans or people arguing about parking spaces.

Today, we're going to settle this debate once and for all by comparing humanity's three greatest hits of caloric engineering: rice, wheat, and potatoes. Or as I like to call them: Asia's Pride, The Western World's Backbone, and Ireland's Ex-Girlfriend.

THE SPEC SHEET

Let's start with the cold, hard numbers, shall we? Because unlike television presenters, actual farmers care about facts.

Looking at these figures, it's immediately obvious that potatoes are the Toyota Prius of the crop world – efficient enough, I suppose, but nobody's writing poetry about them. Rice and wheat, meanwhile, are neck and neck in the calorie department, like two German luxury sedans competing to see which can most efficiently empty your bank account at the petrol station.

But calories alone don't tell the whole story. That would be like judging a car solely on its top speed, which is precisely what most motoring journalists do anyway.

THE NATURAL HABITAT

Like exotic supercars, each of these crops has very specific environmental requirements. Try to grow them in the wrong place and you'll have about as much success as trying to drive a Ferrari through a peat bog.

RICE demands conditions so specific it might as well be a Hollywood celebrity rider. It needs to be warm, wet, and standing in water for most of its life – like a spa holiday that ends with someone eating you. Temperatures must stay above 20°C during the growing season, and water must be abundant. It's essentially the diva of agriculture, demanding its trailer be filled with precisely 73.6 degrees of standing water at all times.

WHEAT, by contrast, is the sensible middle manager of crops. It thrives in temperate zones with moderate rainfall between 250-1750mm and temperatures of 15-24°C. It's the crop equivalent of someone who wears sensible shoes and has a pension plan. Not exciting, perhaps, but it won't throw a tantrum if the dressing room isn't painted the right shade of eggshell.

POTATOES prefer it cool and bright – like a British person on holiday who refuses to remove their shirt despite being in the Bahamas. They sulk dramatically if temperatures rise above 30°C, and demand cool nights with bright days. Essentially, they want the climatic equivalent of a five-star hotel room: cool, well-lit, and with excellent room service.

THE MOTORIZATION QUESTION

Now we come to the really important bit – how much of this farming can be done while sitting down in something with an engine?

WHEAT is the clear winner here. Wheat farming is so mechanized that a modern farmer can harvest enough wheat to feed a small village without ever having to stand up. Massive combine harvesters that cost more than my London flat can reap, thresh, and winnow faster than you can say "agricultural subsidy." It's the Formula 1 of farming – high-tech, highly efficient, and completely incomprehensible to the average person.

POTATOES fall somewhere in the middle of the mechanization spectrum. There are impressive machines for planting and harvesting potatoes, but they look like they were designed by someone who was asked to create "a machine that can dig up buried treasure without damaging it." They're effective but frightening – rather like German luxury automobiles.

RICE, traditionally, has been about as mechanized as a medieval blacksmith's shop. For centuries, it was planted and harvested by hand in a process so labor-intensive it makes building a dry-stone wall look like a quick hobby. In places like Japan, farmers would bend over in flooded paddies for hours, transplanting seedlings one by one in a process that would have today's health and safety officers reaching for their clipboard and their strongest pen.

However, and this is the important bit, rice farming is now catching up faster than an American muscle car that's just had its first taste of a corner. Modern rice planters and harvesters are transforming what was once backbreaking labor into something that can be done while listening to talk radio and complaining about the government.

THE VERDICT

If these three crops were cars, wheat would be a reliable German saloon – efficient, predictable, and about as exciting as watching paint dry. Rice would be a Japanese sports car – high-maintenance but capable of incredible performance in the right conditions. And potatoes would be a Land Rover Defender – not the fastest or most efficient, but capable of surviving practically anywhere and surprisingly versatile.

So which is best? That's like asking which is the best car in the world – it depends entirely on where you live, what you need it for, and how much labor you're willing to put in.

If you live somewhere wet and warm and don't mind some engineering challenges, rice will reward you with more calories per hectare than anything else on earth. If you prefer moderate climates and the ability to farm while barely leaving your climate-controlled tractor cab, wheat is your champion. And if you're somewhere cool and want a crop that offers reasonable returns with moderate effort, potatoes will do the job while providing more nutritional variety than the others.

But if you asked me – and no one has – I'd say wheat is the winner simply because it's made mechanization its best friend. And in my book, any crop that lets farmers spend more time sitting down is clearly superior to one that doesn't.

And that's not just my opinion. That's a FACT.

Javier Clarkson is CanAmericaNews.com's agriculture and motorization correspondent. His farming opinions are entirely his own and not influenced by the fact that he gets winded climbing a single flight of stairs.

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