While Asian cultivated rice, Oryza sativa, represents a new crop for the northeastern US, it should be noted that northern wild rice, Zizania palustris, which grows naturally in North American marshes, lakes, and slow-moving rivers, was widely consumed by indigenous people long before the European colonization of the Americas. Prized for its long, highly nutritious, black grains, wild rice is known as an ‘old food’ by the Gayogo̱hó:nǫʔ people of the Cayuga Lake region of New York. Zizania is a completely different genus and species than Oryza sativa, but both thrive in wet areas and belong to the same Oryzeae tribe. Wild-harvested Zizania, a sacred food of indigenous people, remained a dietary staple even as maize was introduced into the northeastern US over 2,000 years ago.
Over the years, farmers in the northeastern US have experimented with small-scale Asian rice (Oryza sativa) production, motivated by a diversity of interests — promoting local food economies and sustainable agriculture, improving water, soil and biodiversity management in wetland environments, maintaining long-standing cultural traditions, or simple aesthetic enjoyment of the rice plant as a feature of the landscape. Today, rice is being grown using a myriad of different methods based on local soils, topography, climate, water availability, access to labor, machinery, markets, and scale.
Climate changes dramatically across the northeastern US which impacts the varieties of rice that are able to mature and set seed. Warmer regions (e.g. parts of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and along the coast) can successfully grow some of the cold-tolerant varieties from California, while more northernly, high-altitude, inland regions require earlier heading and earlier maturing, cold-hardy rice varieties, such as those bred in Hokkaido, Japan or in northern China or Korea. “Growing Degree Days” is a metric that can be used to help predict which varieties are able to mature at a particular location, though there is tremendous year to year variability. It is more predictive than latitude because it takes into account the cumulative daily temperatures within the rice growing season. To visibly describe the range of climates in the northeastern US, growing degree day (GDD) data was used to create a map of the Northeast.
Identifying rice varieties that thrive in the temperate climate zone of the northeastern US has greatly benefited from breeding efforts outside the US. Rice varieties bred for the southern US and a majority of California varieties do not reliably flower or set seed in the northeastern US, while rice varieties bred in Hokkaido, Japan, northern parts of Korea and China, or northern Ukraine, and available in the US through the National Plant Germplasm System of US Department of Agriculture, are well-adapted and productive.
Some of the early “rice pioneers” in the northeastern US include Erik Andrus of Boundbrook Farm in Vermont, Christian Elwell of South River Miso in Massachusetts, and Ben Rooney of Wild Folk Farm in Maine. Their history is summarized in a book entitled “The Rice Revolution: Growing Rice in New England”. In an interview with McCouch, Christian Elwell (Cornell, 1969) said, “the idea to grow rice in New England first came to my mind in the mid 1970’s through conversations with friends in the Boston macrobiotic community. In 1983 Professor John Peverly of Cornell sent seeds from an heirloom/landrace variety of rice to trial at my home- South River Farm in Conway, Massachusetts. The seeds were from a short-grain variety of rice from the Ukraine, by the name of ‘Duborskian’. He told Dr. Susan McCouch that Duborskian was adaptable to dryland or paddy culture and might succeed within our climatic constraints. “Elway noted that “As far as I know, when I first grew Duborskian in Conway that year, I became the first person to grow rice in New England.” Indeed, Elwell has grown it almost every year since then, in both paddies and in dryland plots, saving seeds each fall to plant the following spring, and sharing seeds with others who request them.
Starting around 1985, Linda and Takeshi Akaogi farmed organically on the Earthbridge Community Land Trust in Westminster West, Vermont. They grew mostly fruits and vegetables but took an interest in growing paddy rice in some persistently wet areas that proved unsuitable for traditional crops. By 2006 they had constructed a rice paddy system and holding pond, and in 2007 they reached out to the McCouch Rice Lab at Cornell for help obtaining additional seed from cold-season rice varieties. In 2008 and 2009, they received two Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) grants that enabled them to conduct field trials of over 100 temperate-adapted rice varieties obtained through the McCouch lab and compare production techniques. An NSF grant through the McCouch lab supported the importation of hundreds of cold-tolerant, short-season rice varieties from Japan, Korea and China, a web-site (www.ricenortheasternus.org), the development of educational materials, and a series of summer rice workshops (2009-2014) that served as a hub for communication among a network of farmers interested in small-scale temperate rice production.
It is based on this foundation of experience, experimentation, and open-minded knowledge-sharing that in 2023, we embarked on a new chapter of this long-term effort to expand opportunities for sustainably growing “Rice in the Northeastern US”. This phase of work is supported by a committed team of plant scientists and Cooperative Extension specialists at Cornell, expert guidance from Erik Andrus of Boundbrook Farm in Vermont, and the cumulative knowledge of many practitioners who have come before.
The NY Rice Project welcomes existing and new community partners that envision an agroecosystem serving multiple beneficiaries. The proximity of the rice paddies to the Cornell University campus attracts birding enthusiasts that appreciate the creation of threatened shorebird habitat in Tompkins County. We showed in the very first year of the project (2023), that the rice paddies serve as a field of dreams for avian biodiversity. If you build it, they will come. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird checklist for Herman Rd. wetland (rice paddies) is maintained by Paul and Tristan Herwood.