The Postal Service issued Crops of the Americas definitive stamps in five designs on March 16, 2006, in New York, New York. Phil Jordan of Falls Church, Virginia, designed the stamps.
Artist Steve Buchanan of Winsted, Connecticut, created the art for the five stamps. 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 before Europeans arrived in the New World.
These stamps were available in three formats: H PSA vending booklet of twenty, H PSA double-sided booklet of twenty, and H PSA coil of 100. The Banknote Corporation of America, Inc., and Sennett Security Products, using the offset process, printed 100 million stamps in vending booklets. Sennett Security Products printed 801 million stamps in double-sided convertible booklets and 1 billion coil stamps in the gravure process.
