Harvesting is the process of collecting plants, animals, or fish as food, especially the process of gathering mature crops, and "the harvest" also refers to the collected crops. Harvesting commonly refers to grain and produce, but also has other uses: fishing and logging are also referred to as harvesting. The term "harvest" is also used in reference to harvesting grapes for wine. Within the context of irrigation, water harvesting refers to the collection and run-off of rainwater for agricultural or domestic uses. In a non-agricultural sense, the word "harvesting" is an economic principle which is known as an exit event or liquidity event.

Harvesting depends on many factors like season, crop variety, maturity period, etc. Reaping is the cutting of crops for harvest, by using a scythe, sickle, or reaper. Manually harvesting is done by using sickles but it is an unvaried job as well as time taking. In recent times, machines called harvesters are used for harvesting, especially wide-ranging farming harvesting, threshing of the crop has to be carried out. Hand harvesting is a technique for manually or by hand picking grains, fruits, vegetables, leaves, etc. . Machine harvesting is the practice of gathering large quantities of grains with the aid of contemporary harvesters.

Some traditional tools used for harvesting include small sickles, big sickles, small axes, etc. . Modern tools used for harvesting include combine harvesters, which are used to harvest things like corn, soybeans, and wheat. These machines do three things at once: cutting and gathering the crop; separating the edible parts of a crop, the grain, from the inedible stalks; and moving the unwanted stalks and husks away from the grains. Other crops, like apples, are picked by hand.