AS WITH all plants, rice needs water in order to thrive. However, when it comes to rice, the impression that most folk have of the plant is that it has to be grown in water at least knee-deep.
We've all seen that watercolour landscape painting (usually titled "a kampung life" or something to that effect) where rice plants are grown in flooded paddy fields framed by picturesque mountains and suspiciously small wooden houses.
While these paintings are mandatory fare at most art shows and grandparents' living room walls, is it true that it's just as mandatory for rice to be grown in water?
Verdict:
FALSE
If you were to plant a rice seed directly into the soil, it would germinate and grow into a rice plant.
Given enough time, sunlight, adequate watering (watering, not flooding) and protection from pests and weeds, your little seedling will grow into a fully grown rice plant of about 1m to 1.5m tall.
A rice plant is a grass after all, so it should be technically easy to plant and grow, with no flooding required.
If that's the case, then why do farmers go through all that effort and expense to flood their paddy fields?
The straightforward answer is that all that water keeps pests and weeds away.
Modern pesticides and herbicides are a relatively new invention when it comes to rice farming, most of which were introduced during the green revolution that occurred during the first half of the last century.
Seeing that our region of the world has been growing rice for at least 10,000 years, if not more, it's safe to say that farmers from year zero would not have had access to said pesticides and herbicides.
Unlike many of the other grasses mankind has domesticated over the ten plus millennia, rice is actually a semi-aquatic plant.
It is believed that Oryza sativa rice was first domesticated in the Yangtze River basin in China somewhere in between 13,500 to 8,200 years ago.
Now, the Yangtze River basin is a part of the world that until fairly recently, floods frequently.
This meant that plants growing in the river basin had to evolve strategies to survive these frequent floods.
In the case of the precursors to modern rice, they evolved a special kind of hardiness that allowed them to survive this frequent flooding, and perhaps even use the floods to disperse their seeds.
Ancient farmers noticed that their rice plants would survive these floods whereas weeds and pests couldn't.
This led them to create their own rice paddies and terraces to mimic the floods of the Yangtze to keep those nasties away from their precious plants.
Truth be told, if other staple grasses such maize, corn or wheat were semi-aquatic like rice, then the ancient farmers of Europe and the Americas would most likely have grown their crops in flooded fields and "paddies" as well to keep the pest and weeds at bay.
Bottom line is, rice does not need to grow in water-logged paddies, it's just that they grow much better if they are.
In fact not all rice is grown in standing water. Breeds such as upland rice (padi bukit) are grown in dry fields much like wheat.
As a side note, Asia isn't the only "birth place" of rice cultivation. Oryza glaberrima rice was independently domesticated in Africa 3,000 to 3,500 years ago around the Niger River delta.
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