The History of Paddy Rice Production in Kansas

Most states used to have a series of annual agricultural reports detailing such things as increases in sorghum production, the number of acres in all crops, the adaption of new crops like soybeans, the number of pigs raised and slaughtered, and county data on dairy production. I doubt these are printed anymore, but I’m sure the data is still collected. These reports would come as hard-bound copies with titles like “Kansas Agricultural Year in Review - 1934”, or some such. Inside you would find occasional pictures, turning to sepia, with a man in a fedora and wide tie pointing to something on the ground, or a fuzzy picture of a corn field. A new volume would come each year to all the Extension offices in the state. The Secretary of Agriculture got one for his/her big bookshelf backdropping their desk. If there was a call asking how many piglets were sold in Cowley County in 1967, somebody could find the answer.

This is offered in that spirit, a sincere review of the state of Kansas paddy rice production. At present, I believe it is near zero. But, for a three year period 1986-1988, and then again, around 2010, it was a striving part of the ag. economy, known only by me, another person who has since passed, and our friends.

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On my return home from West Africa in 1984, I had settled on a pretty little farm south of Topeka. There was a pond, with a spillway that ran down through a flat-bottomed, wooded ravine. At the end of the day, I had time on my hands, and I decided to replicate the rice paddies that I had worked in and promoted in Sierra Leone.

My first question was whether rice could even be grown in Kansas. I was worried there would be day length problems, or degree-heating day problems this far north from the equatorial regions where I had grown it. But I learned that some Asian immigrants were having luck growing it around Albany, New York, and when you think of the latitudes of places like Piemonte in Italy, where their rice is grown, you realize that it is roughly the same latitude as northern Michigan, below the bridge.

All the work in Sierra Leone had been done with axes, hoes, shovels and head pans. Hand tools. Some of the fields created were monumentally impressive, and once planted, as rice swamps are, as beautiful as agriculture can be. The paddies stair step down from top to bottom, and from outside to central drain, with vivid green patches of rice in various states of growth, standing in several inches of water.

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I started by clearing out all the trees in the bottom of my ravine, and then rooting out the stumps. I then built a high headbund (dam) across the top of the ravine, to impound some water, but more importantly, to channel the water to the higher outside edges of the swamp. I could do this first because there wasn’t a whole lot of water coming through. In Sierra Leone, a country with 125” of rainfall, the problem was always dealing with too much water. There, the first task was to dig a straight drain from the bottom of the swamp to the top, to give you some terra firma in order to chop down massive palm trees, caladiums and all manner of tropical plants like you now find for sale in Home Depot. Digging those central drains entailed removing tangled masses of vegetation and ocassional large trees, often while treading in water and mud up to your neck. Don’t forget the snakes!

Of course, there were fewer problems of that nature in Kansas. My headbund stood about 4’ high and it fed the two peripheral channels which were dug right at the outside edges of the ravine, all the way down to the bottom of the field. These were dug with the aforementioned hoes, axes and shovels, the dirt being thrown up into a bund that was about 2 feet high, connected to the head bund, and wide enough to dry out, stabilize and be walked upon as footpaths.

I then started making paddies from the top. The topmost was bordered by the headbund and the peripheral bunds. I drew a line across at a slight natural drop-off, and built a cross bund from one side to the other. The dirt came from what would be the next paddy below. Throwing this dirt higher helped to level the paddy above, but also the second paddy below. This continued on down until I had 7 irregular, stair-stepping paddies, surrounded by bunds, each with channels on both sides. Since the amount of water passing through was slight, I could drain each paddy to the one below when the time came, without need of a central drain.

During this time, I was also trying to find rice seed. There are thousands of varieties of rice seed, none of which were readily available in Kansas. At the time, the internet was just a gleam in Beelzebub’s eye. Amazon was a river or a mythical woman warrior.

I thought about South Carolina. Rice production had been a big deal in South Carolina during the time of slavery, and many Sierra Leoneans had been stolen from their coastal homes and brought through Charleston to the Carolina coast, specifically to be used on rice plantations. The Gullah and Geechee coastal people around St. Helena and Savanna still speak a krio which is easily understood by krio speakers in Sierra Leone.

But the Carolina coastal rice culture disappeared with slavery, because, without slaves, it was too much work for those who profited from it.

Rice is now mostly grown in northern California, Texas and Arkansas, in huge fields, using enormous tractors and combines, just like wheat and sorghum and beans and corn.

I had a friend in Sacramento. She had a friend who was a preacher in the rice areas, and through that connection, she managed to get me a 50# bag of California rice seed. I started calling seed dealers in Arkansas, and eventually I got ahold of a guy who sold me a couple of open-pollinated varieties used down there. He sent them to me by greyhound bus.

To level my new paddies, I would throw dirt from the top, highest point of each paddy, down to its lowest point. This is done with a broad, short-handled hoe, used in many kinds of grain culture in Africa. Often there, you will see people plowing with them in a row, singing to keep a rhythm going.

Eventually, I had my mostly leveled, plowed paddies and I could block the side channels at the top of each paddy, and send the water in. As the water rose, you used it to gauge where the paddy might yet need leveling.

The primary reason for rice standing in water is weed suppression. Many varieties of rice do not need standing water, but can suffice on occasional irrigation. But rice is more tolerant of standing water than most other plants, and thus, when standing in water, thrives while most of the weeds are killed.

I had to wait until the next spring to start my first crop. This is done in a nursery bed - a well-prepared smooth, slightly elevated patch of mud in the paddy itself. Once frost was past, I scattered seed thickly, one bed for each variety, and smoothed it into the mud. I would come out morning and evening to splash water on the beds. The seed soon emerged in the most brilliant vigorous carpet of green imaginable. You could see clear growth every day, so I had to hustle to get the paddies ready to receive them.

I would flood each paddy, and then puddle the clods and chunks of dirt remaining from plowing. Puddling entails stepping on those water-soaked clods in your bare feet, and working them into a thick chocolate pudding, completely and levelly submersed.

As the seedlings reached about 6 inches, I would scoop up handfuls and carry them to where I was planting. Swirling their roots in the muddy water to separate the plants, I would nestle a single seedling down into the mud, about 6-8” away from all the others. I found it aesthetically most pleasing to do this in a grid pattern. As the planted patches of spaced green started growing down the irregular stair steps of my swamp, I fell in love with the crop again. There was probably a 3 or 4 week time difference in the paddies from the top to the bottom, so the stages of growth were very evident, plus each of the varieties appeared different. But all so green - a green Kansas had never seen!

The plants lengthened, then tillered (sent up seed heads), and started to fill out into large clumps. Each variety different in length and tillering and color.

I maintained the water as best I could, through rainfall shortages and sometimes mini-floods. I would try and weed once a week, by wading through the paddies, with water and mud halfway up my shins, pushing any weed growth down and under the mud. Rice withstands this passage very well.

Did I mention that rice culture entails a lot of stooping?

Eventually, the rice booted and large, broomy heads came out. The crop takes on a new, paler, more diaphanous color with the new panicles rising above. The grains fill and the heads become heavier, weeping down. The crop turns golden, like wheat. As that happens, you start to drain the paddies to give firmer ground to walk on during harvest.

In Sierra Leone, they harvest every head by hand and bundle them, neatly trimmed with 6” of stalk bound as a handle. The bunches resemble a fly swish. They are weighty, and very satisfying to hold. You can understand how that feels to a subsistence farmer, holding and waving in your hand a family meal for the hungry season ahead. Those bundles are stored in the cookhouse, above the smoldering fire, to keep insects and rats at bay.

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The second year, I decided to keep growing two of the varieties. I am a poor chronicler, because I can’t remember the names of those varieties. But I am sure they were a jumble of letters and numbers. I could only do this because they were not hybrids and I could save seed.

I grew rice for 3 years. Lynn helped with the final crop. At one point, we held a rice planting party and everyone interested in twisted agriculture showed up. I can remember Kansas’ revered baker, Thom Leonard showed up with a group of Land Interns from Salina. And Arden Booth came from Lawrence.

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So why did I stop?

I whined about the amount of work entailed - the digging, the planting, the watering, the weeding, the stooping, the harvesting, etc. I have not even talked about food preparation. The dehulling, the winnowing, the cooking. Rice has a strongly attached hull. In Sierra Leone, it was detached by pounding in large, heavy wooden mortars and pestles. You hear rhythmic thumping in every village, as women and girls pound the rice. Strength was necessary. I was often embarrassed by the strength and stamina of even little girls. Then it is winnowed in large flat baskets, by tossing it in the air, for the hulls and dust to blow away, leaving the rice. Then the rice may be pounded again to polish it, removing the endosperm on some varieties because people don’t like the taste. Only then can it be boiled. Keep in mind there is a sauce for the rice, and that also only comes with work, a combination of products of the forest, farm and streams. Self-sufficiency is more work than any American has ever imagined.

Lately I have been catching ads for preppers - “Three weeks of preserved, savory meals, ready to eat. Be ready when it all goes down.” I think these guys also envision a use for all their firepower - shooting food. Of course, we all know it will be impossible to hunt wild game into extinction, like humans have done almost everywhere. The self-delusion that any American has a clue about how to subsist is just a subset of our larger, general delusions.

Anyway, Lynn and I started our lives together. Our kids came along. We got busy. We became market farmers. It became easier to go to the store and buy a 1# bag of rice for dinner. Within a year or two, there were 2” caliper trees growing up in my paddies and I grew rice no more.

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Then, about 2010 or so, a quirky acupuncturist named Richard Morantz, who lived north of Baldwin at the base of the escarpment there, decided to put in a wild, unkept golf course on his 40 acres. The land was swampy and he used those ephemeral ponds as water traps, etc. He basically mowed fairways through that rolling swamp, and put in 9, unkept holes. He got on a couple of lists of regional golf courses, and he said, from time to time, an Escalade would pull up, and big guys with golf bags as large as garbage cans would get out. They would play a hole or two and say “WTF!” and leave.

Anyway, Richard decided to plant rice in his little swamps on the golf course, so I tried to help him find seed, and gave him advice about rice culture. I think he eventually just found some unhulled seed in bulk at a health food store. He planted it and it germinated.

He had no real water control, and his management was pretty laissez faire, but it grew and he got a little rice out of it. But then, of course, came the work of getting it ready to eat. I think he enjoyed the experiment, one of many in his life before he passed.

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And that, as far as I know, is the History and State of Paddy Rice Production In Kansas.