ARLINGTON, VA – Today, U.S. rice is grown primarily in seven states: Arkansas, California, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Texas, but that’s not where rice began here. Rice was first planted on our shores more than 300 years ago in the coastal region of the Carolinas. The conditions on the ground and water sources were quite different than what we see in rice country today, as was the west African technology being utilized at the time by enslaved people to cultivate the rice in those marshy coastal regions.
Heirloom rice varieties, like Santee and Carolina Gold are once again being grown in the Carolinas and a large former rice plantation, Hasty Point, is back in operation in the Waccamaw National Wildlife Refuge in South Carolina.
Craig Sasser, U.S. Fish & Wildlife refuge manager at Waccamaw, joins
the latest episode of
The Rice Stuff podcast to talk about the educational and conservation programs going on there, including the use of rice barns and rice trunks that are unique to the area. Podcast co-host Lesley Dixon had originally interviewed Sasser for a story in the
December 2021 Whole Grain about coastal Carolina’s deep rice roots.
Dixon’s colleague, Michael Klein, then dusts off some interviews from this summer’s Fancy Food Show in New York where he spoke with growers from South Carolina’s White House Farms and North Carolina’s Tidewater Grain Company.
“The area has such a rich rice history, it’s wonderful that U.S. Fish & Wildlife is working to preserve what was, while the Quattlebaum family and Tommy Wheeler, Tommy Mitchell, and Al Spruill are keeping rice growing, literally and figuratively in the Carolinas,” said Klein. “After talking with them about the unique challenges the heirloom varieties present, it’s a credit to them they can do it, while at the same time, it’s not difficult to see why rice types and ranges shifted.”
New episodes of The Rice Stuff are published on the second and fourth Tuesday of every month and can be found on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and online at
www.thericestuffpodcast.com.