Photos

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Rice in Arkansas (5)


*By Holly Hope

(Cont’d)

Water Management

In the earliest years of rice growing in Arkansas the fields would be kept continuously flooded from the moment the plants reached a height of four or five inches to the point the heads turned down, which signaled harvest time. Over time the result of this uninterrupted flooding proved to be detrimental to the crop as it lowered the yield and blighted the head. Early twentieth century trials by the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station determined that water cover helped maintain an even temperature in the day and night air and reduced scum, weeds and insects but it was better for the plant if the field was periodically flooded and drained up to a deadline of ten to fourteen days prior to harvest time, a total of seventy to one hundred days. The pumping of fresh water every ten days was imperative as stagnant water could kill the rice plant.

Just after the seed was planted the field would receive a sprout flooding to facilitate germination. The water would be drained at the appearance of one-third inch white sprouts to prevent rot. When the leaves of the rice plant emerged a point flooding would be applied that would force the rice to grow faster than invasive weeds and grass and subsequently kill the intruders. When the rice reached a height of six inches the water cover was lowered for thirteen to thirty days and then subjected to dry growth for forty to fifty days. During this period the field would be cultivated by plow and hoed to remove weeds, grass and red rice - a separate species that reduced the market value of white rice. A harvest flood would be introduced at the point that the plants began to joint and would remain up until just before harvesting. By the 1950s farmers would drain the fields in the middle of the growth period in order to apply nitrogen fertilizer. Ensuing flooding would transport the fertilizer to the roots of the rice as the water entered the soil.

Harvesting

The dry period of the rice fields prior to harvesting in the fall was essential as the soil needed to be able to sustain the heavy binding equipment so draining would be instigated by cutting into levees with shovels or in later years, removing or upending the levee gates. Differing weather conditions and soil types would dictate the draining deadline for different rice farmers, but the proper period was usually when the fully headed rice turned down, which was normally two to three weeks prior to harvest time. Cutting rice at this time made the grain tough, preventing breakage during milling.

The earliest method of cutting would be with the sickle or cradle, however, by the time Arkansas became a commercial rice-producing state, farm machinery had advanced enough that team-drawn reapers, also known as binders, were commonly used. As tractors became more common on Arkansas farms they would replace animals as a power source in the field. The binder’s driving wheel would be rotated by a bull wheel attached to a sprocket chain, which in turn would drive a sickle and reel. By 1910 gasoline engines replaced the bull wheel. The power source for the binder would provide rotation of the reel, which would bend the stalks of rice toward the sickle, cutting the plant six to twelve inches from the ground. The rice would then be transported by a canvas cloth to a gear driven knotter for tying into a bundle or sheaf. Bundles would be deposited onto a bundle carrier, which placed them in the field to be picked up by workers who would assemble them into a tipi shape known as a shock. This formation would allow unripened grain to dry and rainwater to run off.

W.G. Vincenheller, director of the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station in 1906, recommended that the ground be dry for shocking and that the bundles should be braced against each other in order to prevent damage from rain. He advocated that the shock should be longest on the east and west sides and it should be capped with bundles headfirst to the north away from the sun. The heads needed shelter from rain and sun so they were left in the shock about three or four weeks until the straw was cured and the kernel became hard and dry enough to endure the milling process.

Threshing

Prior to the implementation of combines, the progression of the crop from the field to the rice mill would involve custom threshing of the shocked rice under either a ring arrangement, influenced by the threshing rings of the Midwest, or the use of an independent crew operation. Most rice farms in the state were too small to justify individual ownership of a thresher and the larger machines were too expensive, so farmers would co-operatively gather their equipment and labor for the formation of a threshing crew or ring to work in conjunction with a machine crew. The independent crew operation would involve a machine owner and a complete team who would work for the farmer at a cost per bushel. Under these first come, first served arrangements some farmers were delayed so long in getting their crop threshed that the weather often turned, resulting in increased cost to the farmer and production of poor quality rice. The solution was the formation of partnerships through which farmers bought their own machines and hired operators until they gained enough knowledge to do it themselves.

Transport of the shocked rice from the field to the thresher necessitated a crew of bundle haulers who loaded about eight to ten wagons with bundles to be threshed. In soft, boggy conditions, sleds equipped with a basket rack or bundle cart would be used to avoid getting bogged as the team crossed levees. Tractor-powered bundle carts were developed later that tipped forward as they were filled and were kept balanced by a drop hitch to the tractor. Around World War II a twelve-by-nine foot buck-rake attached to a row-crop tractor came into use, which allowed the threshing of eight hundred bushels a day. The buck-rake enabled operators to collect up to six shocks per load and deposit them upright for feeding to the thresher, thus saving money and cutting down on the amount of required labor.

Steam engines were the dominant power source for threshing until World War I and were still found on some rice farms up to the 1930s when they were largely replaced by the more dependable internal combustion engine. The farmer or steam engineer would install their threshing rig near the rice field and belt the engine to the machine. Laborers hired to haul bundles would load shocks from the field onto wagons to be transported to the thresher where men positioned on the wagons would toss bundles into the thresher cylinder in order to separate the rice from the stalks. The rice would then be directed to the bottom of the thresher and to an elevator, which carried the rice to a “Y” shaped bagger spout, from which it blew into a burlap bag called a tow sack that held one hundred eighty pounds of grain. The discarded straw would be subjected to a constant battering as it traversed the thresher in order to ensure that all the rice was removed. The straw would finally run through a fan housing, which impelled the straw into a blower to be deposited into a stack, which would be used for feed, mulching, beds for livestock or it was burned.

The rice bagging process would require a labor force of three. Two men were designated sack draggers and they were charged with affixing and removing full bags from the bagger spout on the thresher. Each man would shake and settle the bags in order to fill them to their capacity of four bushels then drag them to the sack sewer. The sewer would shape the bag yet again then sew it together making sure to leave ears, extra material at each corner for grasping. The sack sewer was required to be very proficient at his job because he needed to maintain a rate of one sack per minute and execute tightly drawn, close stitches to prevent leakage of rice out of the seams or ears.

(to be cont'd)


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