page_title: Rice
section_title: North America
hierarchical_section_title: Rice / Regional history / North America
caption_attribution_description: FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg and colleagues visited research facilities and rice farms in California on Sept. 4-5, 2013 in an effort to gain a greater understanding of the presence of arsenic in rice. Here, Hamburg and Deputy FDA Commissioner for Foods and Veterinary Medicine Michael Taylor, center, don hip waders to go out into the rice fields at Lundberg Family Farms in Richvale, Calif. At left is Bryce Lundberg, the farms' vice president of agriculture, and at right is Mike Denny, vice president of farming operations. For more information, read the FDA Voice blog: • On Farms and in Labs, FDA and Partners Are Working to Get Answers on Arsenic in Rice FDA photo by Erica Pomeroy
context_page_description: Rice is the seed of the grass species Oryza glaberrima or Oryza sativa. As a cereal grain, it is the most widely consumed staple food for a large part of the world's human population, especially in Asia and Africa. It is the agricultural commodity with the third-highest worldwide production, after sugarcane and maize.
  Since sizable portions of sugarcane and maize crops are used for purposes other than human consumption, rice is the most important grain with regard to human nutrition and caloric intake, providing more than one-fifth of the calories consumed worldwide by humans. There are many varieties of rice and culinary preferences tend to vary regionally.
  Rice, a monocot, is normally grown as an annual plant, although in tropical areas it can survive as a perennial and can produce a ratoon crop for up to 30 years. Rice cultivation is well-suited to countries and regions with low labor costs and high rainfall, as it is labor-intensive to cultivate and requires ample water. However, rice can be grown practically anywhere, even on a steep hill or mountain area with the use of water-controlling terrace systems.
context_section_description: In 1694, rice arrived in South Carolina, probably originating from Madagascar. Tradition (possibly apocryphal) has it that pirate John Thurber was returning from a slave-trading voyage to Madagascar when he was blown off course and put into Charleston for repairs. While there he gave a bag of seed rice to explorer Dr. Henry Woodward, who planted the rice and experimented with it until finding that it grew exceptionally well in the wet Carolina soil.
  The mastery of rice farming was a challenge for the English and other white settlers who were unfamiliar with the crop. Native Americans, who mostly gathered wild rice, were also inexperienced with rice cultivation. However, within the first fifty years of settlement rice became the dominant crop in South Carolina.
  In the United States, colonial South Carolina and Georgia grew and amassed great wealth from the slave labor obtained from the Senegambia area of West Africa and from coastal Sierra Leone. At the port of Charleston, through which 40% of all American slave imports passed, slaves from this region of Africa brought the highest prices due to their prior knowledge of rice culture, which was put to use on the many rice plantations around Georgetown, Charleston, and Savannah.
  From the enslaved Africans, plantation owners learned how to dyke the marshes and periodically flood the fields. At first the rice was laboriously milled by hand using large mortars and pestles made of wood, 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 millwright Jonathan Lucas was another step forward.
  Rice culture in the southeastern U.S. 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. Today, people can visit the only remaining rice plantation in South Carolina that still has the original winnowing barn and rice mill from the mid-19th century at the historic Mansfield Plantation in Georgetown, South Carolina. The predominant strain of rice in the Carolinas was from Africa and was known as 'Carolina Gold'. The cultivar has been preserved and there are current attempts to reintroduce it as a commercially grown crop.
  In the southern United States, rice has been grown in southern Arkansas, Louisiana, and east Texas since the mid-19th century. Many Cajun farmers grew rice in wet marshes and low-lying prairies where they could also farm crayfish when the fields were flooded. In recent years rice production has risen in North America, especially in the Mississippi embayment in the states of Arkansas and Mississippi (see also Arkansas Delta and Mississippi Delta).
  Rice cultivation began in California during the California Gold Rush, when an estimated 40,000 Chinese laborers immigrated to the state and grew small amounts of the grain for their own consumption. However, commercial production began only in 1912 in the town of Richvale in Butte County. By 2006, California produced the second-largest rice crop in the United States, after Arkansas, with production concentrated in six counties north of Sacramento. Unlike the Arkansas–Mississippi Delta region, California's 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.
  References to "wild rice" native to North America are to the unrelated Zizania palustris.
  More than 100 varieties of rice are commercially produced primarily in six states (Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and California) in the U.S. According to estimates for the 2006 crop year, rice production in the U.S. is valued at $1.88 billion, approximately half of which is expected to be exported. The U.S. provides about 12% of world rice trade. The majority of domestic utilization of U.S. rice is direct food use (58%), while 16% is used in each of processed foods and
caption: US Food and Drug Administration officials at a rice farm in California
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