Down with rice.

An anonymous said this in the comments, and it prompted me:

California also grows *rice* which is another water hungry crop.

OK, I hear this a lot, and I understand the rough take. Rice! So tropical! Makes one think of monsoon fed flooded fields! So water intensive! In arid California! Rice in California sounds like a bad plan.

I’ll defend growing rice in Calfornia, though, especially in the Sacramento Valley. The Sacramento Valley is a great rice growing region, primarily because of its clay soils. My rough understanding is that the Sacramento Valley used to flood every winter, nearly over the entire valley floor. The floods would drain slowly for months, but during that slow recession, fine silts had time to settle and form a clay layer. I can vouch that the soils are clay-ey and sticky. Walking through a wet field gets you a five or six inch thick clump under your each boot. Because of these clays, you can hold water in a rice paddy indefinitely. You can’t grow much else on them.

But the water! So much water! Well, yes and no. It is true that rice requires a decent amount of water, about four-ish acre-feet per acre per year. It is also true that you have to manipulate the hydrologic cycle to provide that; there are no half-inch rains twice a week to keep your paddy full. But there is water enough for rice. It just falls in the winter. You have to store it, and release it later, but the climate in northern California provides more than enough water for rice. We’re in a built system now, so we can do that.

Four-ish acre-feet? Isn’t it a lot more than that? It used to be. Until a decade ago, Sac Valley growers grew flow-through rice. They constantly fed water into the top paddy; it trickled through the paddies and out drainage canals into the Sac River. That can use ten to twelve acre-feet (per acre per year) or more. They don’t do that anymore, and the reason has nothing to do with water scarcity. The State Board made them stop. The State Board forced them to hold water in their fields until their herbicides had broken down to some threshold concentration. (Rice growers tout this as environmental dedication now, but they fought it bitterly when the regulation came down.) They’ve been trying varieties of rice, long and short stemmed, to see what they can grow in different heights of water. Rice is no longer a water-guzzler.

I like some things about rice in the Sac Valley. In some ways, it mimics the cycle of flooding up large stretches of the valley floor and draining it slowly (although it pushes it back three months). Rice looks amazing. I swear, rice is the reference green. There is nothing greener than rice. It shimmers green, with greener pulses. All spring you think that the young rice sprouts are the greenest thing you ever saw and come summer, it darkens into more green. Rice fields smell good. White egrets look beautiful against a rice field. Rice uses soils that probably couldn’t grow any other agricultural crops. California grows very good rice; high yields, very high quality. Ricelands are also preserving a sink capacity that might otherwise have been lost; we will need places to spread big flood waters and rice fields are a good candidate.

So the big problem with rice these days isn’t the water use. The current environmental problem caused by rice is rice straw. Used to be, rice growers drained their paddies, harvested their rice and burned the straw. The smoke used to fill the valley, block out the sun. The Air Board put a stop to that, and ever since, growers have been trying to find a way to get rid of rice straw. The Air Boards offers permits for some limited burning. Growers have been selling rice straw to fill rolls to use on construction sites to prevent sediment run-off. There is talk of using the rice straw for biofuels or methane production. People have suggested using rice straw to replenish the peat that blows away when Delta islands are farmed. If you let the rice straw sit under water all winter, it (mostly) decomposes, but rice growers fear cross-year rice diseases. That requires a second flood-up for the year, of de-comp water. That has been messing with water district canal maintenance regimes. The problem isn’t solved yet.

Anyway, a long digression about rice. Basically, I am not opposed to growing rice in California. It no longer uses an extraordinary amount of water, and has some nice features. In keeping with my belief in eating locally, I do wish since northern California is an excellent rice-growing region, we were also a rice-eating culture. But that’s a different post.






A side note for Tom:

One of the best things about rice is that it uses so much jargon. Another plus! We love jargon! Since you asked for a glossary:

Rice is grown in checks. (I called them paddies, because you are probably used to the term rice paddy.) But here, the whole field, tens of acres surrounded by a berm and filled with water to grow rice, is a check.

Water fills the check through a check structure (something in the canal to divert water into the check) or through a rice box. A rice box is embedded into the berm at the top of the field. It is, roughly, a rectangle of known width (preferably standardized throughout the district) with flashboards in it. You pull the flashboards in the spring for the flood-up and measure (not very precisely) the flow through the rice box by knowing the height of the water over the top flashboard.

I forget all the rest of the jargon for rice. When the rice itself forms in seed tassles, it is ‘heading up’. I think you want to harvest right before the “shatter”. If I think of more, I’ll add it.