Peanut (Arachis hypogaea)

Arachis hypogaea, commonly called the peanut, is a legume crop of the family Fabaceae grown mainly for its edible seeds, an annual herbaceous plant standing thirty to fifty centimeters tall. Its species name, given by Carl Linnaeus from the Greek for under the earth, describes the plant unusual habit of ripening its seed pods underground rather than above ground like most legumes. The species is native to South America, specifically the region east of the Andes around Peru, Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil, and is now grown throughout the tropics and subtropics as both a grain legume and an oil crop. Like other legumes it hosts nitrogen-fixing bacteria in its roots, improving soil fertility and making it valuable in crop rotation, and its raw seeds are notably rich, containing about forty eight percent fat, twenty five percent protein and twenty one percent carbohydrate per hundred grams.