The Rice Country of Southwestern Louisiana

Abstract

T HERE is a unique story to be told about rice growing in southwestern Louisiana. It is a story of the revolution of an industry by mechanization and large-scale production, mostly by the application of techniques in use in other areas and other industries. This revolution took the rice industry out of the ponds and coulees and put it on the open prairie, where thousands of acres of land were for the first time made available for cultivation. Although rice has been raised in South Carolina for about two centuries and in parts of Louisiana for more than a century, it was only after I 88o that these fundamental changes permitted rice farming on a large scale. And although southeastern Texas, the Grand Prairie in Arkansas, and the Sacramento Valley in California now raise rice on a large scale, it was the Louisiana Prairies that led the way. Rice is not the only commercial crop grown on the Prairies, but it is the most important. Sugar cane and cotton, each of which is raised in rotation with corn, occupy two distinct land-use areas in the eastern part of the Prairies. The land not occupied by these two crop combinations was open grazing land until the present rice-cattle economy developed. The new industry partook of the techniques of the wheat country of the Middle West. It has nothing in comrnon with the old practices of the lowlands of South Carolina; in fact, it is an outlier of the grain industry rather than of Oriental and quasiOriental methods of growing rice in paddies. Experimentation and progressiveness on the part of the rice farmers and the experimental stations have brought their economy down to a simple stable plan of annually alternating land use between rice growing and cattle grazing. Thus at the present time about 300,000 acres of the Prairies are planted in rice annually; but a map showing the distribution of the crop gives a much larger acreage.