Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, August 26, 1997

Louisiana rice industry began on Acadia prairies

Crop became mainstay after railroad opened markets of the world

by Jim Bradshaw

The first Europeans to arrive raised cattle on these grasslands. But later, when the Civil War was done, and the cattle industry began to falter from a fever brought in by Mexican beef, the earlier settlers would watch as Germans and Anglos came from the Midwest to Acadiana by the railcar-full. These immigrants began to replace the wild prairie grass with another one that would become a south Louisiana staple: Rice.

The grain had been grown elsewhere in the United States since about 1685 when a British ship put into the harbor at Charleston, S.C broken from a storm and in need of repairs. When the repairs were done, the ship's captain left behind a small quantity of "Golde Seede Rice" that he had brought from Madagascar.

The farm folk quickly found that the low-lying marshlands and rich soils of the Carolinas and Georgia were fertile fields for the Golde Seede. Daily tides naturally flooded the fields with fresh river water irrigating a crop that would grow where no other crop would.

By 1700, rice was established as a major crop in the Carolinas. But hurricanes, the Civil War, and competition from other crops eventually took their toll there and rice moved westward to Louisiana, her neighbor states, and to California (to feed a growing Oriental population that had come there during the Gold Rush).

Rice production began in earnest in Louisiana shortly after the Civil War. Many Mississippi River planters who now had to pay for what once was slave labor, switched from sugar cane to rice because it required lower farm hands. Then a few years later when Louisiana sugar cane began to wither from an exotic disease (and from stiffer composition from Cuba and South America), even more planters changed crops.

Rice production prospered along the Mississippi River into the 1880s, until tariffs again made sugar an attractive alternative. Mississippi River planters moved back to sugar opening opportunities for the rice farmers of south Louisiana.

Part of that was because of a gift from nature. Because Texas and southern Louisiana have warm climates and long growing seasons we can usually harvest rice fields twice. We plant the fields in March or April and harvest the first crop in July or August (depending upon variety the crisp matures in 100 to 130 days). The fields are then reflooded and the stubble left from the first harvest grows into new plants which can usually be harvested in late October.

When rice first came to the prairies, Cajun farmers planted small crops in places that couldn't be plowed--along coulees and ditches, next to bayous or in ponds. Sometimes these rice ponds would start as a small water trough dug for livestock but cattle and hogs would trample its edges until it was just right for a rice patch. The Cajuns just threw rice into the standing waters.

What came up they called "Providence Rice."

German immigrants to the prairies of what would be Acadia Parish were the first farmers in southwest Louisiana to raise rice for market and to grow rice on high land.

The St. Landry Democrat of Sept. 18, 1880 reported:

"At the lower end of Faquetaïque Prairie, at what is usually called 'German Settlement' the land has always been considered completely worthless. But this year about 4,600 barrels of rice will be produced in that neighborhood and within a very small compass, not extending up the prairie which is quite narrow here--not more than three or four miles. This rice in the "rough' will net about four dollars per barrel. So we have here a small neighborhood where they used to produce absolutely nothing for sale, a revenue of $16,000. The rice lands in this neighborhood, the marshes, which were once considered not only worthless but a nuisance, are now the most valuable: and it will not be long before they cannot be bought for any reasonable price."

The crop became an Acadiana mainstay after the railroad cut across the prairies in 1881, connecting New Orleans to Houston, and the prairies to larger markets. Rice from the Nicholas Zaunbrecher farm at Robert's Cove was the first to be shipped by rail to New Orleans. The rice was brought to Bayou Plaquemine Brûlée by wagon, loaded on a boat, then reloaded on wagons for the remainder of the trip to the railroad. As the crop began to grow, the railroad companies saw its potential and began looking for people to settle the land.

One of the most effective of the promoters was S. L. Cary, a native of Iowa lured to Louisiana by railroad advertising. He moved to the newly organized town of Jennings in 1883 as station agent for the Southern Pacific. In 1884, he became a land salesman for the company, touring Iowa and Illinois to recruit farmers for the Louisiana lands.

Cary told his friends in Iowa that there were 5 million acres of marsh and over-flowed land that could be bought for 12 cents an acre.

Another 3 million acres were eligible under the federal Homestead Act, in 160 acre patches for as little as $14 down and the payment of another $9 at the end of five years.

Farmers who heard the pitch became even more interested when. in 1886 and 1887, a dry summer and severe winter all but wiped out their crops in the Midwest. They decided to accept the railroad's offer of a free ride to Louisiana.

By 1893, "Cary's Iowa Colony" in Louisiana was flourishing, and so were their rice crops.

Ironically enough, it would be British capital that would finance the land boom once the railroads opened the Cajun prairies. The London-based North American Land and Timber Co. (with home offices at 12 Downing St., London -- next to the British "White House"), for example, swallowed up 1.5 million acres of land in what is now four parishes, paying 12 cents an acre for marshland and as little as 75 cents an acre for prairie.

The North American Land Co. agent in Louisiana, J. B. Watkins, was one of the most enterprising promoters to hit Louisiana since John Law. He bought a newspaper in New York to publicize his land developments and later moved it to Lake Charles. It was the forerunner of today's Lake Charles American Press. He outfitted a railroad car with Louisiana products and land company brochures and toured the Midwest. When yellow fever and malaria scares threatened to keep settlers away, Watkins organized the Telegraph Medicine Co. to advertise and sell an anti-malaria patent medicine.

It all paid off. More farmers came from Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, and all across the American Midwest -- at first expecting to farm wheat and corn here, as they had always done. They soon found that the Louisiana subsoil held too much water for those crops. But they also found that the soil could be cultivated with the same steam tractors, harrows, plows, and threshers they had always used. They looked at the Cajun rice patches and found their new crop.

By 1866, Southern Pacific was shipping 2 million pounds of rice from Acadiana to New Orleans. Six years later, those shipments had grown to 200 million pounds -- and that began to create a problem.

Rice needs a lot of water. By the 1890s, over-cultivation meant that the crop needed more water than natural bayous could supply. The answer would be canal and pump companies, the first of them formed in the area around Crowley. When fields were too far from canals or bayous, water was supplied by deep wells.

About this time, farmers on the Cajun prairies began also to adopt the "modern" rice methods, starting as sharecroppers on lands owned by the water companies. The companies put up seed and water and took one-fourth of the crop.

Rice fields turned green again, but there was yet another battle to fight.

Since there was no economical way tin store rice after harvesting, it was all shipped to agents in New Orleans for milling, storage, and marketing. The agent took one-fifth of the crop. After the rice was cleaned and polished, it was sold to brokers on bids. The farmer seldom knew what price his, crop would bring until it was actually sold. Sometimes the price didn't cover his expenses.

The rice prairie declared its independence from New Orleans in 1892. Production was unusually high that year, and commodity brokers on New Orleans' "rice row" along the North Peters Street waterfront attempted to corner the market. But the rice farmers fought back.

They formed the Farmers' Cooperative Rice Milling Co. to fight the New Orleans bigwigs, and began shipping their crop west to a new mill at Lake Charles instead of east to New Orleans. And they began to build their own mills closer to home. By 1900, there were 10 mills in Acadia Parish alone, and 60 throughout Acadiana's rice belt--in Crowley, Rayne, Estherwood, Midland, Morse, Iota, Egan, Kaplan, Lake Arthur, and other communities.

As the competition stiffened, the country millers began paying cash for their rough rice, eliminating the commission agent. Then, they began marketing their cleaned rice directly to the consumer, cutting another middleman. But still, the price was generally set by New Orleans buyers, based upon an estimate of the crop sometimes made with no more information than a train ride through the countryside.

Things came to a head in 1907, when Gordon S. Orme of the Empire Rice Mill in New Orleans, a leader in setting the rice market, announced that the season's crop would be unusually large and that consumption would be unusually low. He predicted that the market would be flooded and prices would be the lowest ever.

The prairie farmers reacted. The Welsh Rice Belt Journal would report that Orme had "prostituted his reputation as a judge of rice conditions. Rice farmers held a big meeting in Welsh to chastise Orme in particular and New Orleans millers in general. The farmers agreed to hold onto their rice until they got full value for it. The railroads and the Louisiana Railroad Commission were dragged into the battle when New Orleans claimed that south Louisiana farmers were getting a rate break when they hauled their rice elsewhere. The farmers continued to cry foul--and organized the Louisiana Rice Growers Association to put up a united front.

In 1909, the Louisiana Rice Growers and the Texas Rice Growers merged into the Texas-Louisiana Rice Growers Association, and, in 1910, the organization expanded further to become the Southern Rice Growers Association. The growing association broke the New Orleans stranglehold.

Before too long, the state's largest rice mill was operating in Lake Charles, supplying rice to the world through the port there. And, with enough irrigation water and a secure market, farmers began to improve their product. Early in the 1890s, a long-grain variety known as Honduras rice was introduced from Central America. Later, a short-grained type was brought from the Orient because it cracked less during milling. Later, experiments by Solomon Wright of Crowley created the Blue Rose and Early Prolific varieties, both introduced around 1912, and which dominated thin market by 1920. Experiments through the years developed still better varieties.

Large millers, such as Frank A. Godchaux, who founded a mill in 1903 that would become Riviana Foods, next began to develop marketing strategies that sent Louisiana's crop not only across the nation, but around the world.

The first rice to be milled in Acadia Parish was in July of 1888 at the newly built mill in Rayne. By 1898 four mills were operating in the parish, one at Rayne and three in Crowley, and a fifth one was being built. Two of the Crowley mills burned down in 1899.

There were three main shipping points for rice in Acadia Parish: Rayne, Crowley, and Mermentau. Crowley shipped about half of the crop.

This article is copyrighted © by the Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser and is used with permission.  This web site was originated through a grant awarded to Carencro High School (Joel Hilbun/Bobbi Marino, Grant Administrators) by the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education from the Louisiana Quality Education Support Fund - 8(g).