Rice production in the United States

Wooden mortar and pestle found in the rice loft on Briars Plantation, John's Island (Charleston County), South Carolina. It is believed to have been used in husking and/or polishing rice which was grown on the plantation. The age is unknown.

Winnowing barn at the Mansfield Rice Plantation, Georgetown, South Carolina

African rice (a separate species from Asian rice, originally domesticated in the inland delta of the Upper Niger River)[4][5] was introduced first to the United States in the 17th century. However Carolina rice, a sample of Patna rice was the first rice to be domestically consumed and later adopted by masses in America. Patna Rice was already highly popular in Europe by this time and accounted for most of its rice imports. 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. In 1685, a bag of Madagascar rice known as "Gold Seede" (Asian rice) was given to Dr. Henry Woodward. A tax law of 26 September 1691 had permitted payment of taxes by the colonists by way of rice and other commodities.[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." At the port of Charleston, through which 40% of all American slave imports passed, slaves from Africa brought the highest prices in recognition of their prior knowledge of rice culture, which was put to use on the many rice plantations around Georgetown, Charleston, and Savannah.[6] The enslavement of Africans from Senegambia and Sierra Leone was intentional, as these people were from regions that grew rice and would eventually lead to the development of successful rice industries in many states like South Carolina.[8]

Dikes are used to protect the rice paddy fields from the channels of saltwater which overflow during high tide. Karabane, Senegal, 2008; similar delta cultivation techniques were used in West Africa back to at least the 15th century.[9]

Similar dike, used to grow rice in the early United States, now abandoned and reclaimed by woodland[9]

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. Rice was planted, hoed, and harvested with hand tools; plows and harvest wains could be pulled by mules or oxen wearing special shoes.[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). The invention of the rice mill increased profitability of the crop, and the addition of water power for the mills in 1787 by American millwright Jonathan Lucas was another step forward.

Rice production was not merely unhealthy but lethal. 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. Not one child in ten lived to age sixteen. 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. Enslavers often stayed away from rice plantations during the summer, so slaves had more autonomy during these months.[10] Rice plantations could produce profits of up to 26 percent per year. Runaways, on the other hand, were a problem:[6]

I gave them a hundred lashes more than a dozen times; but they never quit running away, till I chained them together, with iron collars round their necks, and chained them to spades, and made them do nothing but dig ditches to drain the rice swamps. They could not run away then, unless they went together, and carried their chains and spades with them. I kept them in this way two years....

— one overseer's method of controlling slaves, reported by fugitive slave Charles Ball

Most plantations were run on the task system, where a slave was given one or more tasks, estimated at ten hours' hard work, each day. After they had finished the tasks to the overseer's satisfaction, they could spend the remainder of the day as they chose, often on growing their food, spinning, sewing their clothes, or building their houses (slaves were typically supplied with nails and five yards of cloth per year). 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. For almost the first 190 years of rice production in the US, the principal producers were South Carolina and Georgia. Limited amounts were grown in North Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.[11]

Plantation workers carrying sheaves of rice, South Carolina, circa 1895

Rice was introduced into the southern states of Louisiana and east Texas in the mid-19th century.[12] Meanwhile, soil fertility in the east fell, especially for inland rice.[6]

Emancipation in 1863 freed rice workers. East-coast rice farming required hard, skilled work under extremely unhealthy conditions, and without slave labour, profits fell. Increasing automation in response came too late, and a series of hurricanes that hit Carolina in the late 1800s and damaged levees put an end to the industry. Production shifted to the Deep South,[13] where the geography was more favourable to mechanization.[11]

These events can be seen in rice production statistics. In 1839, the total production was 80,841,422 pounds, of which 60,590,861 pounds were grown in South Carolina and 12,384,732 pounds in Georgia. In 1849, cultivation reached 215,313,497 pounds.[14] Between 1846 and 1861, annual rice production in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia averaged more than 105 million pounds of cleaned rice, with South Carolina producing more than 75 percent. 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.[8]

A Civil War era rice barn on a plantation along the Pee Dee River

At the census of 1870, after emancipation, the production of rice decreased to 73,635,021 pounds. In 1879, the total area devoted to rice was 174,173 acres, and the total production of clean rice was up again to 110,131,373 pounds. A decade later, the total area devoted to rice cultivation was 161,312 acres, and the total production of clean rice equaled 128,590,934 pounds; this represented a 16.76 percent increase in the amount produced, with a decrease of 7.38 percent in the area 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. After 1880, their average annual production approximated 46 million pounds of cleaned rice, of which North Carolina produced 5.5 million, South Carolina 27 million and Georgia 13.5 million pounds.[11]

The rice industry in Louisiana began around the time of the Civil War. For a number of years, production was small, but during the 1870s the industry began to assume large proportions, averaging nearly 30 million pounds for the decade and exceeding 51 million pounds in 1880. In 1885, the production reached 100 million pounds, and in 1892, 182 million pounds. 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. In 1896, yield from the Louisiana rice fields, where harvesting machinery was used, was good. However the milling process was not successful commercially in some rice varieties. The loss due to the milling process was considerable, particularly of the unbroken rice in the "head rice" variety.[11]

Hauling rice in South Texas, 1909

Rice was established in Arkansas in 1904, California in 1912, and the Mississippi Delta in 1942.[3] Rice cultivation in California in particular started during the California Gold Rush. 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. However, commercial production began only in 1912 in the town of Richvale in Butte County.[15] Since then, California has cultivated rice in a big way, and as of 2006, its production of rice was the second largest in the United States.[16]