The rice plant causing all the controversy has a seed containing human proteins found in breast milk and tears — the company testing the product claims proteins found in the plant seed could produce medicine used to fight anemia and diarrhea, one of the leading causes of death for children under the age of 5 years.
An April issue of Science published the results of a joint study by researchers at UC Davis, Rutgers, and in China finding that farmers growing genetically modified rice in field trials in China reported higher crop yields, reduced pesticide use, and fewer pesticide related health problems. Contributed by and 4 others. We are a c 3 non-profit organization. Except where otherwise noted, this content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
See Copyrights. Explore Map Activity. Add a new page. Edit Info. Add tags. Shasta Lake, the state's biggest reservoir, isn't exactly full it's at 56 percent of capacity , but it has more water than this time last year.
Which raises a question: Given how dry it is elsewhere in the state, shouldn't the rice farmers be selling some of that water? But the deals were contingent on how much water those districts got, and most backed out as they got word that they won't receive their full allotments, according to recent news reports. One oft-stated reason for these decisions is that rice farmers are already fallowing about 25 percent of their acreage because of the drought, and cutting back planting even more than that would hurt local businesses that revolve around rice growing.
As a matter of local politics and just plain neighborliness, this makes sense. As far as statewide economics, not so much. In California, rice is planted from airplanes and harvested with giant machines -- it's not a labor-intensive crop.
When Peter Gleick of California's Pacific Institute set out a decade ago to calculate how many jobs were created relative to the amount of water used in various agricultural and industrial pursuits, rice came in dead last at one job per 1, acre-feet of water. Almond and pistachio orchards created six jobs per 1, acre-feet, fruit and vegetable crops 18 jobs and semiconductor manufacturing 9, Another reason for not selling water is that water rights aren't absolute.
If you sell all the water you're entitled to, many farmers fear, the state or the courts may eventually take those rights away.
State officials have been doing what they can to assuage such fears and encourage water transfers, but worries understandably remain. Then there's the rice growers' trump card. The draining of the swamps that began in the s was what enabled the valley's blooming as the country's most important agricultural region.
It also destroyed millions of acres of wildlife habitat. Rice growers have figured out that, for birds at least, their flooded fields can function as surrogate wetlands. They now try to avoid insecticides in their farming, and make habitat preservation a major priority. State officials and many environmentalists have come to accept that rice fields play a crucial role in maintaining what's called the Pacific Flyway for migratory birds.
For this reason alone, California rice isn't going away. But still, does there need to be quite as much of it grown as there is? There's no satisfactory answer to this. Rice is California's fourth biggest crop by acreage, after almonds, alfalfa and grapes. And while there have been some significant ups and downs -- and the state's peak rice year remains , when , acres were harvested -- the overall trend has been up. During a drought in the number of acres harvested fell to , Last year it was , This is the way of California farmers.
They don't just grow stuff, they grow it in huge quantities with ever-increasing efficiency rice production has grown much faster than acreage , then they band together to find new markets for it. In the case of rice it hasn't just been advertising and marketing, but also a decades-long diplomatic campaign to get Japan to open itself to rice imports. Such efforts in almost any other industry would be universally applauded; it can seem a little unfair that entrepreneurial, market-savvy behavior in agriculture is so often derided as corporate or industrial farming.
Still, you can't quite say that the market determined that ,odd acres of California farmland should be planted in rice. California's water markets are something less than functional. The rice farmers generally qualify as water-rich, but they have limited opportunities to take advantage of those riches other than by planting rice. Rice is also one of the few major California crops that gets federal agricultural price-support subsidies.
Those subsidies have been piddling in recent years because rice prices have been high, but overall the price supports surely induce farmers to plant more rice than they would otherwise. Then again, the value of rice fields as wetland stand-ins probably isn't fully reflected in the returns to growers.
There is no simple equation here -- just a lot of fields, buried in 5 inches of water, in the midst of a drought. Justin Fox is a Bloomberg View columnist writing about business.
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