Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, June 24, 1997

Rice farming a key to Vermilion Parish

by Jim Bradshaw

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 wound 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."

The crop became an Acadiana mainstay after the railroad cut across the prairies in 1881 to connect New Orleans to Houston, and when the railroad companies began looking for people to settle the land.

By 1886, Southern Pacific was shipping two million pounds of rice from Acadiana to New Orleans. Six years later those shipments had grown to 200 million pounds.

Soon, mills were springing up across Acadiana, and large millers such as Frank A. Godchaux, who opened the mill in 1903 in Abbeville that would become Riviana Foods, began to develop marketing strategies that would send Louisiana's crop around the world.

In the days before modern machinery, whole communities would come together to harvest the rice crop with horse-drawn implements and plenty of manpower. In a history of the community of Cossinade, the Vermilion Parish Historical Society gives some insight into how those early farming communities worked together.

"These crops were harvested much later than they are harvested today because the rice had to dry by natural heat from the sun. The rice crop was usually harvested in September and October, because it was cool. Slabs of meat were hung on the north side of a barn or house until ready to be cooked. The cooking was done outside in big deep black iron pots and also inside on wood burning and coal oil stoves. Some of the men also helped with the outside cooking. A typical menu consisted of jambalaya, roast, rice, gravy, pork backbone, vegetables available from the garden, potato salad, baked sweet potatoes.

"Harvest was a fun time for the children -- games were played, songs were sung, babies cried, older children took care of the young ones or they just sat and watched the activities around the threshing machines.

"The rice was brought from the shocks in the field to the threshing machines by mule- or horse-drawn wagons. The bundles of rice were stacked neatly high up on a wagon, with the driver sitting on top with long reins to guide the mules or horses to the thresher. The driver of the team of animals parked his wagon close to the thresher where the rice was pitched by the driver, with a pitchfork in a conveyor that brought the rice in the machine. The grain of rice was separated from the rice straw. The rice straw made a hay shock (cattle ate the straw in the winter). The rice went into sacks. The sacks of rice were hand-sewn to close the sack and were put aside to be hauled to the warehouse by horse-drawn wagons.

"The noon meal was brought to the men in the field at the thresher. All work was stopped so all could be fed.  Food was brought in large containers -- there were no paper plates--so there was plenty dishwashing to do. Children had chores also."

Irrigation canals began to open the prairies to rice cultivation just about the turn of the century. One of the larger systems was that built by William Hawkins Hunter, who began acquiring land in the spring of 1898.

He started digging on Bayou Vermilion about 10 miles north of Abbeville. The canal was dug 10 miles west from Milton, then 5 miles south, and again 5 miles west, making 20 miles of main canal, 200 feet wide and 8 feet deep. Lateral Canals were dug from the main canal for many years, until the system eventually included some 400 miles of major and minor channels.

By the 1930s, the harvest had become more mechanized but was still not without some problems. Abrom Kaplan, a pioneer in the mechanization and irrigation of the rice industry in Vermilion Parish, gave these insights in an interview in the 1930s.

"Let me tell you how we grow rice. ...We make it, from beginning to end, all by machine. The human hand does not have to touch the plant or the grain at any point."

"First, we plow--early in the fall, as soon as possible after the old crop is off. We use, as a rule, a 10-20 or 1530 tractor, behind which is a tandem disk harrow, and behind that a 50-tooth smoothing harrow. One man can prepare about twelve acres a day.

'The land lies fallow over winter. In the spring we hook disk drills to our tractors, and seed.  That is when we use headlights and work, if we have to, day and night. We put in about eighty-five pounds of rice to the acre and plant it about two inches deep.

"Some of this work I have done directly on my own land, but most of it is done by tenants who work on tracts of from one hundred to two hundred acres. They work under a one-year lease, with equipment provided, and share with me fifty-fifty.

"When the plants are eight inches high we flood the land to a depth of two inches and keep pumping on water until, when the rice is a foot high, the water stands on the field four or five inches deep. In the fifth or sixth month the head of the rice becomes heavy with grain. It droops over. That is the signal for us to drain the land and go on to it with our harvesting machinery. A good yield is somewhere between forty and fifty bushels to the acre."