![]() And demand is increasing in Asia, Latin America and especially in Africa. More than 3.5 billion people get 20 percent or more of their calories from the fluffy grains. “It’s really concerning.”įarmers in China, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam - the biggest rice-growing countries - as well as in Nigeria, Africa’s largest rice producer - also worry about the damage climate change will do to rice production. “They’re talking about less and less snowpack, and more concentrated bursts of rain,” Rystrom says. This “climate whiplash” looms over Rystrom and the other 2,500 or so rice producers in the Golden State. Tractors couldn’t move through the muddy, clay-rich soil to prepare the fields for seeding.Ĭlimate change is expected to worsen the state’s extreme swings in precipitation, researchers reported in 2018 in Nature Climate Change. “In 20, we were leaving ground out because of flood. ![]() Not too long ago, the opposite - too much rain - stopped Rystrom and others from planting. Drought in the Sacramento Valley has forced Peter Rystrom and other rice farmers to leave swaths of land barren. On August 4, Lake Oroville, which supplies Rystrom and other local rice farmers with irrigation water, was at its lowest level on record. On April 1 this year, the date when California’s snowpack is usually at its deepest, it held about 40 percent less water than average, according to the California Department of Water Resources. If too little snow falls in those mountains, farmers like Rystrom are forced to leave fields unplanted. In spring, melting snowpack flows into rivers and reservoirs, and then through an intricate network of canals and drainages to rice fields that farmers irrigate in a shallow inundation from April or May to September or October. Rice growers in the valley below count on the range to live up to its name each winter. To the city’s east rise the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, which means “snowy mountains” in Spanish. producer of rice, after Arkansas, and over 95 percent of California’s rice is grown within about 160 kilometers of Sacramento. In some parts of the Sacramento Valley, depending on water rights, he says, farmers received no water this season.Ĭalifornia is the second-largest U.S. “We’ve had to cut back between 25 and 50 percent.” He’s relatively lucky. Low water levels in reservoirs and rivers have forced farmers like Rystrom, whose family has been growing rice on this land for four generations, to slash their water use. The drought started in early 2020, and conditions have become progressively drier. But today the soil lies naked and baking in the 35˚ Celsius (95˚ Fahrenheit) heat during a devastating drought that has hit most of the western United States. In a typical year, he’d be sloshing through inches of water amid lush, green rice plants. Under a midday summer sun in California’s Sacramento Valley, rice farmer Peter Rystrom walks across a dusty, barren plot of land, parched soil crunching beneath each step.
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