Rice ingenuity

Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)

For too long, agricultural history has told the stories of commodity production alone. Scholarly treatments of the Columbian Exchange, meanwhile, have focused only on the organisms that traveled from place to place during the age of European exploration. According to Judith Carney, these are the blind spots that Black Rice aims to remedy. Carney’s story pairs consumption with production and knowledge systems with the seeds that crisscrossed the Atlantic.

Carney’s primary purpose may be “to place ingenuity in its proper setting”, to restore Africans to their rightful place in Atlantic history (8). And she spends a number of pages—perhaps too many, considering her emphasis on skills over seeds—carefully tracing the African origins of American rice. But one of her most significant innovations is her treatment of rice production as a knowledge system. Before the ascendance of mechanized crop production, Carney writes, “agriculture represented repositories of cultural knowledge built from generations of observation, trial, and error. Agriculture has long provided the tissue linking culture to environment, cultural identity to food” (136). The story of rice, then, must include not only its botanical heritage, not only cultivation techniques, but also how people processed and prepared it. For the Africans who carried rice cultivation to the Americas, rice was equally a crop and a food. Production and consumption were joined in a way that gave rice a long future as a staple. The West African cropping systems, to use modern parlance, were entirely sustainable.

Even given the possibility that Carney exaggerates the ecological appropriateness of African rice cultivation, it is hard to disagree with her argument that plantation economics profoundly disrupted this dynamic. This was especially the case in the processing rice, which in the colonial period had to be accomplished manually with mortar-and-pestle. The enormous scale of global consumption increased the demand for labor, transforming rice milling as “the echo of cultural identity” into “inhuman . . . labor”; mechanization of the process further eroded the cultural meaning that had been attached to processing rice (124). Commercial agriculture stretched the limits of both land and labor in the lowcountry, in part because an indigenous knowledge system for South Carolina rice was not allowed to develop gradually. The social and ecological limits went unrecognized.

I wonder if something similar may have happened in the peach industry. Peaches were not essential to the American diet, as rice was to Africans, but they played a role similar to that of apples described in Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire: hog fodder, brandy, and, occasionally, human food. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, increasing anxieties about the sustainability of cotton production and the example of the California fruit industry led more and more southern (particularly Georgia) farmers to try peaches. Increased railroad efficiency and the refrigerated railcar made northern markets more accessible, and peach production rose precipitously: from 2.7 million trees in 1890 to 12 million in 1910. Much of this increase, I suspect, comprised growers who were new to peaches and had not grown them for local consumption (some had never grown anything before). These growers got into the business for the promise of large profits. The knowledge system required to grow peaches successfully was not given time to evolve gradually.

The result, unsurprisingly, was boom and bust agriculture. Georgia growers overproduced, stretching the limits of the northern markets and making themselves vulnerable to problems like San Jose Scale, plum curculio, and brown rot. Production peaked in 1928 at 10 million bushels, declined, and finally settled into a more even pattern after World War II. The growers in the business today are mostly long-time family enterprises—the ones with the knowledge system to grow peaches reliably.