When was rice found

In recent years rice production has risen in North America, especially in the Mississippi River Delta areas in the states of Arkansas and Mississippi. Rice cultivation began in California during the California Gold Rush, when an estimated 40, Chinese laborers immigrated to the state and grew small amounts of the grain for their own consumption.

However, commercial production began only in in the town of Richvale in Butte County. By , California produced the second largest rice crop in the United States, after Arkansas, with production concentrated in six counties north of Sacramento.

More than varieties of rice are commercially produced primarily in six states Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and California in the U.

According to estimates for the crop year, rice production in the U. The U. The majority of domestic utilization of U. Rice was one of the earliest crops planted in Australia by British settlers, who had experience with rice plantations in the Americas and the subcontinent.

Although attempts to grow rice in the well-watered north of Australia have been made for many years, they have consistently failed because of inherent iron and manganese toxicities in the soils and destruction by pests. In the s it was seen as a possible irrigation crop on soils within the Murray-Darling Basin that were too heavy for the cultivation of fruit and too infertile for wheat.

Because irrigation water, despite the extremely low runoff of temperate Australia, was and remains very cheap, the growing of rice was taken up by agricultural groups over the following decades. Californian varieties of rice were found suitable for the climate in the Riverina, and the first mill opened at Leeton in Even before this Australia's rice production greatly exceeded local needs, and rice exports to Japan have become a major source of foreign currency.

Above-average rainfall from the s to the middle s encouraged the expansion of the Riverina rice industry, but its prodigious water use in a practically waterless region began to attract the attention of environmental scientists. These became severely concerned with declining flow in the Snowy River and the lower Murray River. Although rice growing in Australia is highly profitable due to the cheapness of land, several recent years of severe drought have led many to call for its elimination because of its effects on extremely fragile aquatic ecosystems.

The Australian rice industry is somewhat opportunistic, with the area planted varying significantly from season to season depending on water allocations in the Murray and Murrumbidgee irrigation regions.

Go to selected references. A project of. Where is rice grown? What types of rice are grown? How is rice grown What happens after harvest? Rice productivity Who grows rice. The global staple White and brown rice Quality factors Nutritional content Cooking methods Other rice products. Food security Poverty alleviation Shrinking resources Climate change Gender and equity. History of rice cultivation. History of rice cultivation Oryza sativa was domesticated from the wild grass Oryza rufipogon roughly 10,—14, years ago.

Regional development of rice cultivation Asia Based on archeological evidence, rice was believed to have first been domesticated in the region of the Yangtze River valley in China. Africa African rice has been cultivated for years. Rest of the world Middle East Rice was grown in some areas of southern Iraq. Caribbean and Latin America Rice is not native to the Americas but was introduced to Latin America and the Caribbean by European colonizers at an early date with Spanish colonizers introducing Asian rice to Mexico in the s at Veracruz and the Portuguese and their African slaves introducing it at about the same time to Colonial Brazil.

Australia Rice was one of the earliest crops planted in Australia by British settlers, who had experience with rice plantations in the Americas and the subcontinent. So the Chinese team went through the tedious process of sifting the phytoliths from dirt, washing and sieving and heating until they ended up with a white powder of pure phytolith.

They then used carbon dating to pinpoint the age of phytoliths found at different depths in the excavation. The oldest material was as old as 9, years. Then they peered at the phytoliths under the microscope.

The rice that the people cultivated at Shangshan 9, years ago was not like the rice we eat today. The grains were likely small and thin.

They scattered easily—as seeds trying to disperse themselves are wont to do. Just as 10, years of domestication has transformed rice into fat, starchy grains that cling to the stalks for easy harvest, they have transformed the phytoliths, too.

The team turned their attention to surface patterns on the phytolith which are shaped like fish scales. Luckily, as discussed below, new methods It is also the case that early Chinese sites with rice finds also produced evidence for quantities of definitely wild foods, such as acorns, Trapa water chestnuts, and another marsh nut of Asia, Euryale ferox. Proponents of a hypothesis of later domestication including member of the Early Rice Project contend that this find indicates a predominantly hunter-gatherer-fisher lifestyle, and that only with later cultivation and domestication of rice, perhaps closer to BC, did people give up gathering as many nuts and focus on farming rice.

This raises the need to consider not just the evidence of rice remains themselves but to systematically study rice in the relation to an overall picture of plant use reflect in archaeobotanical assemblages. Strong evidence for a slow domestication process, which indeed finished late, were published in Science in BP of rice domestication in China: a response. Holocene Evidence for wild rice cultivation and domestication in the fifth millennium BC of the lower Yangtze region.