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over their canoes and flailing them with sticks to release the grass seeds into the bottom of the
boat. When the canoe was nearly full, they paddled to the shore and roasted the seeds over low
fire, pounded to release the hulls and stored the rice for winter food.
The earliest wild rice dealers were fur traders in Minnesota, Ontario and Saskatchewan
who found that the wild rice added a wonderful new experience to a meal. Some of the fur
traders eventually became wild rice growers in Minnesota. They did their own selective breeding
of seeds from each new crop choosing the healthiest plants with highest yield, and developed
progressively better wild rice, also getting some help from the University of Minnesota
researchers.
How we grow wild rice
In the mid-1970s rice growers introduced wild rice into California's rice-growing region
in the Sacramento Valley and attempts to grow proved highly successful. Because of its high
price, fifty-some growers quickly switched from regular to wild rice crops and within years they
devoted large acreages to wild rice. While they systematically flooded their rice fields, they also
quickly flooded the still weak wild rice market, and the price plummeted. In the following few
years many farmers converted wild rice fields back to their mundane white rice.
The switch from growing white to wild rice is an easy one. They both take the same field
conditions, harvesting methods and equipment with minor changes here and there. The farmers
cannot use herbicides to kill weeds growing with wild rice. Any chemical that destroys the weeds
also destroy the wild rice. Carefully regulating water depths at different stages of rice plant
development is the only way to eliminate most of the weeds without chemicals.
To sow the wild rice, modern California farmers hire aircrafts that scatter seeds from the
air into flooded fields. After 80 days they drain the fields and when the seeds reach full maturity,
they harvest the rice with conventional combines. In Minnesota, Ontario and Saskatchewan
commercial production is still a lot more primitive because they use natural waterways instead of
large open fields like in California, making large-scale mechanization problematic. Their yield of
wild rice per acre is only a quarter of California's.
Wild rice can grow in much cooler weather than white rice so in California farmers can
plant it any time of the year. In cool weather it matures in about 170 days instead of the usual
100 to 105 days for white rice.
Another peculiarity of wild rice is the dormancy of the seeds. In natural conditions in the
Great Lakes region, the mature seeds drop into the water, sink to the bottom and remain dormant
in cold water until the next growing season. California growers discovered that without this
dormancy period in cold water, seeds don't germinate well. So they store the seeds for next year's
crop in 35°F (2°C) water for at least 5 months to make them think they are on the bottom of a
Minnesota lake.
Unlike other forms of rice, the wild plants don't all mature at the same time, a huge
problem for harvesters. This unusual property of wild rice is called shattering. Agronomists
developed new cultivated varieties (called cultivars) that are resistant to shattering and tend to
mature close to the same time. They selected these cultivars for earlier maturity as well.
Between harvest and the package
The harvested rice is called green rice, but the name refers to their young stage, not to
play © erdosh 187
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