Rice production in the United States

Rice production is the fourth largest among cereals in the United States, after corn, wheat, and sorghum.

Contemporary rice production in the United States includes African, Asian, and native varieties from the Americas.

It is mentioned to have been under cultivation in Virginia as far back as 1609, although it is reported that one bushel of rice had been sent to the colony later, in the summer of 1671, on the cargo vessel William and Ralph.

[6] [7] The colonies of South Carolina and Georgia prospered and amassed great wealth from Asian rice planting, based on the slave labor and knowledge obtained from the Senegambia area of West Africa and from coastal Sierra Leone.

One batch of slaves was advertised as "a choice cargo of Windward and Gold Coast Negroes, who have been accustomed to the planting of rice."

[8] Enslaved Africans cleared the land, diked the marshes and built the irrigation system, skimming the freshwater layer off the high tide, flushing the fields, and adjusting the water level to the development stage of the rice.

[6] At first rice was milled by hand with wooden paddles, then winnowed in sweetgrass baskets (the making of which was another skill brought by slaves from Africa).

One 18th-century writer wrote:[6] If a work could be imagined peculiarly unwholesome and even fatal to health, it must be that of standing like the negroes, ankle and mid-leg deep in water which floats an ouzy mud, and exposed all the while to a burning sun which makes the air they breathe hotter than the human blood; these poor wretches are then in a furness of stinking putrid effluvia.

Inadequate food, housing, and clothing, malaria, yellow fever, venomous snakes, alligators, hard labour, and brutal treatment killed up to a third of Low Country slaves within a year.

However, in the 1770s, a slave could produce rice worth more than six times his or her own market value in a year, so this high death rate was not uneconomical for their owners.

The task system, and the unwillingness of free people to live in rice-growing areas, may have led to the greater survival of African culture among the Gullah.

[6] In the country's early years, rice production was limited to the South Atlantic and Gulf states.

East-coast rice farming required hard, skilled work under extremely unhealthy conditions, and without slave labour, profits fell.

By 1850, South Carolina's cash crop was rice which was on 257 plantations producing 159,930,613 pounds and at its highest there were 150,000 acres of swamps under cultivation.

[14] Between 1890 and 1900, Louisiana and Texas increased rice crop acreage to such an extent that they produced almost 75 percent of the country's product.

Between 1866 and 1880, the annual production of the three states averaged just under 41 million pounds, of which South Carolina produced more than 50 percent.

The great development of the rice industry in Louisiana after 1884 resulted from the opening up of a prairie region in the southwestern part of the state, and the development of a system of irrigation and culture which made possible the use of harvesting machinery similar to that used in the wheat fields of the Northwest, greatly reducing the costs of production.

It was introduced primarily for the consumption of about 40,000 Chinese laborers who were brought as immigrants to the state; only a small area was under rice cultivation to meet this requirement.

[16] Rice culture in the southeast became less profitable with the loss of slave labor after the American Civil War, and it finally died out just after the turn of the 20th century.

[6] In California, production is dominated by short and medium-grain japonica varieties, including cultivars developed for the local climate, such as Calrose, which makes up as much as 85% of the state's crop.

Carolina rice was popularized in France by the renowned French chefs Marie Antoine Carême and Auguste Escoffier.

Other countries to which the US exports rice include Mexico, Central America, Northeast Asia, the Caribbean, and the Middle East, Canada, the European Union (EU-27), and Sub-Saharan Africa.

[29] A popular custom observed on New Year's Day, by many Americans (mostly from the southern states) is the preparation and consumption of a rice cuisine called the "Hoppin' John".

"[6] The International Rice Festival is held every year in Crowley, Louisiana, on Friday and Saturday of the third weekend in October.