By Chris Segura

In 1948, rainbows of rice fell on south Louisiana.

The bright-hued bands of cascading grain were released from a Stearman biplane. The pilot was a World War II veteran aviator who had flown transports over the Himalayas. His name was Chris Crusta.

When he opened that hopper he participated in a revolutionary technological
development in the cultivation of the world’s oldest cereal, a crop vital in the global war against famine and steeped in ancient rituals of spring and fertility.

That’s why they shower newlyweds with rice at weddings.

The aerial agricultural application (crop duster) company that employed Crusta at the time was perfecting a “spreader” to seed rice evenly, planting from the air while the food that fed most of the world was still being planted mostly by hand.

In most of the rice-growing world it is still planted that way. The rice was dropped on empty asphalt parking lots on Sundays when businesses were closed. Later the pilots would examine the results of each pass and go back to the drawing board, then the machine shop and finally back into the air.

Rice has had an enormous impact on virtually every society on the globe since its cultivation began at least 12,000 years ago in Asia.

RICE CULTURE WAR

It was instrumental in starting the War Between the States, for instance. South Carolina was the first state of the union to spawn a vibrant rice-based economy. It was also the first to agitate for secession after Abraham Lincoln and his Republican Party came to power in Washington.

On Dec. 20, 1860, six Georgetown, SC, rice growers met in Charleston with representatives from throughout the state and signed an “Ordinance of Secession.” The elite society there and then was called the “Rice Culture.” The plantation owners declared a “Planters’ War for Southern Independence.”

Crusta’s experiments 88 years later were more successful.

Other states followed Rice Culture lead but Union gunboats and troops interrupted South Carolina rice production, most fields lay fallow for the rest of the war and the South was devastatingly defeated.

PREHISTORY & ARCHEOLOGY

Scholars at the International Rice Research Institute believe rice began spreading across the Himalayas to China 2 to 3 million years before Crusta flew his transports over “The Hump” as the mountain range was called in military parlance during the war.

The IRRI is a non-profit organization based in Luzon, The Philippines. It is dedicated to improving the futures of low-income farmers and consumers by developing hardier and more productive strains of rice easier to produce with less water and lower concentrations of chemicals.

Institute researchers say that 2 to 3 million years ago migration of fauna across the mountain range was still possible. With the animals went wild rice, deposited in neat packets of fertilizer. Even then, they say, the climate of Central Asia and north China was ideal for the cultivation of rice.

This wild rice contributed to cultivated forms that still exist in largest varieties in the monsoon rainfall zones from eastern India through Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, northern Vietnam and southern China. In this way, mainland Southeast Asia has been identified as the cradle of rice cultivation. There is also linguistic evidence to support this argument. In many of the dialects of Asia, the words for “rice” and “food” are synonymous. This is not true anywhere else in the world.

Hindu and Buddhist holy writings frequently refer to rice. Both religions make use of the grain a major offering to the gods.

However, rice is not mentioned either in the Old Testament or early existing Egyptian records. Archeological evidence has established that rice was an important food in Mohenjo-Daro culture of the Indus Valley in what is now Western India and Pakistan as early as 2500 BC. It was also an important food source in the late Neolithic period of the Yangtze Basin of China.

In 1966, pottery shards carbon-dated from at least 4000 BC were found with imprints of rice grains and husks in the Korat region of Thailand. Other plant remains dating from 10,000 BC were discovered in Spirit Cave on the Thailand-Myanmar border.

RICE GENOME

Still, after all these millennia, improvements in rice cultivation and development may be just beginning, from a scientific point of view. Specialists believe “genomics, the science of deciphering DNA sequence structure, variation, and function in totality, is expected to become the engine that drives discovery of traits and to help solve intractable problems in crop production,” according to an IRRI statement.

“Through genomics, we will discover every rice gene, the functional diversity of genes in germplasm, and the overall architecture of genetic, biochemical and physiological systems in rice. Such knowledge will lead to new genetic improvement strategies to meet future targets in rice production.

“The entire rice genome sequence is expected to be available within five years.
A completely sequenced rice genome will represent an enormous pool of information for rice improvement through marker-aided selection or genetic
transformation,” according to the IRRI statement.

It is doubtful that Crusta was fully aware of the role he was playing in world history when he banked his biplane over that parking lot in 1948. He would learn a lot about the mysticism of Cajun rice cultivation, though. Eventually, he located his agricultural flying in Abbeville, Louisiana, political seat of Vermilion Parish where the highest concentration of Cajuns is located.

His personal life was a success story, too. When he died in the late 1990s, he was a respected citizen recognized as a pioneer in agricultural aviation. The Abbeville airport was renamed in his honor.

Crusta was not Cajun but the vast majority of his clients were. In just a few years he learned that there was one day of the planting season on which his services were most in demand. He planned his entire calendar around it, saving time for the larger clients he knew would want it.

That date was based on Easter, set by the Roman Catholic Church on the phases of the moon. It was the first Sunday after the first full moon after Easter, obviously deriving from ancient, agriculturally based culture.

Filed Under: Food Talk