More Than Just Mud — A Day in a Rice Paddy
- Date: 14 August 2024
- Author: Shira D.
Preface
In 2019, WWF began its ‘Next California’ project to examine shifting specialty crop production in the US in the face of climate change. This work, led by Julia Kurnik, Senior Director for Innovation Startups at WWF, quickly focused on the Mid-Mississippi Delta. The work focuses on building an equitable and sustainable commercial-level specialty crop industry in the Mid-Delta region. The aim is to take pressure off California, avoid land conversion elsewhere in the country, and ensure that environmental concerns and women and minority farmers are the heart of a new farming system.
During this work, Julia built an Advisory Council of stakeholders from across the region, including Hallie Shoffner, a sixth-generation Arkansas farmer. As the Next California project entered Phase III in March 2024, Hallie launched Delta Harvest, the first pilot of this project, focused on growing specialty rice as an easier-to-transition crop and one with a lot of room to improve environmental sustainability. Rice makes up 12% of global methane emissions (and 1.5% of total greenhouse gas emissions), largely due to flooding and/or burning of rice fields. Rice is also an extremely thirsty crop –3,000-5,000 liters of water are used to produce 1 kg of rice on average. However, a technique called alternate wetting and drying (AWD) uses 25-70% less water, which also reduces GHG emissions.
As Julia worked on this project, her children, Shira and Asher, asked a lot of questions at the dinner table. They sampled some of Hallie’s earliest rice and it led to a detailed discussion on rice’s water use, GHG impact, and ways to help address that. They were thrilled to help save the environment by eating environmentally friendly rice – especially because it was purple! In July, Julia and her family journeyed down to Hallie’s farm to play in her flooded rice paddies, getting to see firsthand AWD, which Hallie practices. Shira learned so much from the experience that she was eager to share some of those learnings and her perspective with others through the below blog post.
I had so much fun in the rice paddy. I saw a big crab, tadpoles, and a frog. The water was very cold and murky, and the mud was cold and squishy, but it was still fun. We even brought a puppy named Poppy and she played with us, too.
My five-year-old brother, Asher, my Dad, and a friend all got very, very messy having a mud fight in the rice paddy. They were completely brown! "I thought it was fun," Asher said. "I got to have a mud fight with my Daddy and my friend, Max, and we got super muddy."
Unfortunately, flooding rice paddies is bad for the environment because it uses too much water, and it also makes the leaves of the rice plants rot and turn into greenhouse gases. I asked my brother if he would give up going in the rice paddies if it saved the Earth. He said, "Yes, because it would save the animals and people."
The good news is he does not have to give it up. If farmers only flooded some fields sometimes and other fields other times, it would save a lot of water and lower greenhouse gases. That means my brother and I might have to play in different fields on different days but that just means more adventures for us.
Shira is 8 years old and will be going into 3rd grade in September. In her spare time, she builds Lego houses and takes care of her four cacti, two cats, and one dog.