New Stamps

The Postal Service will issue Crops of the Americas definitive stamps in five designs, on March 16, 2006, in New York, New York. The stamps, designed by Phil Jordan, Falls Church, Virginia, go on sale nationwide March 17, 2006.

Artist Steve Buchanan, of Winsted, Connecticut, created each of the five stamp designs. As reference, he used slide photographs made by his wife Rita Buchanan's research in the late 1970s on indigenous agricultural methods in the southwestern United States. The crops depicted in the stamps - corn, chili peppers, beans, squashes, and sunflowers - had been cultivated in the Americas for centuries when Europeans first arrived in the New World.