Photos

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Photo: The boy in foreground is Tri Nguyen — a Vietnamese descendant. He told Cindy and Frank Prislovsky who farm about 4,000 acres of rice in Stuttgart, Arkansas, “your harvesting way is quite different than in my fatherland.” At their curiosity, the boy explained, “Vietnamese people has to bend over like this whole day long, with one hand to gather a panicle then use a sickle on other hand to cut the branched cluster…”
The American thanked him for the information, and gave him a ride on the New Holland combine so he could see how the big machine could help the process of rice harvesting.

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Rice in Arkansas (7)


*By Holly Hope

(Cont’d)

Milling

In the early years of rice production in Arkansas the market for planters was made up of inconsistent buyers from Louisiana and Texas. By 1907 some leading businessmen and farmers organized the Stuttgart Rice Mill Company and had enjoyed a profit of $16,000 in that same year. The expansion of rice production in the Prairie by 1909 had reached such proportions that there was a need for more mill capacity so a second facility called Mill B was constructed across the street from the original in Stuttgart. Beginning in the early 1900s new mills were built in substantial numbers across the rice sections of the Arkansas Delta.

The main function of the milling process was to remove the husk and bran layers from rough rice straight from the field to achieve the desired end product, which was the starchy endosperm destined for consumption. The earliest method of obtaining husked rice was a hand process borrowed from the Native Americans, which consisted of grinding kernels on a hollow log with a pestle made from a hardwood stick. Pecker mills and cog mills powered by animals and water mills — also known as Lucas Mills — came in use in the eighteenth century. As mills became more mechanized a pounding procedure used to remove the second cuticle known as the bran was replaced with a huller or scourer, and polishers that removed the third cuticle were implemented by the late nineteenth century. Arkansas mills began to use rubber rollers rather than hewn millstones and composition stones to loosen rice husks by the late 1940s.

The milling of rice took place in stages beginning with cleaning using coarse screens to separate the paddy rice or rough rice from material that was bigger than the grain, such as straw, stones and mud lumps. Fine screens were used to eliminate small weed seeds, sand, dirt and other materials smaller than the rice. The grain was husked by a sheller, which tore the hulls from the kernels, loosening them by sending the paddy into two spinning rubber rollers rotating at differing speeds in order to slacken the hull. Then the rice was sent to the aspirator, which completely removed the hulls by using sieves to retain the light weight husk, or ventilation to blow the husk off with wind currents. A paddy separator would segregate shelled grain, or brown rice from unshelled grain that did not lose its hulls on the first pass, through the use of an inclined metal sheet that separated the lighter, shelled rice and sent the paddy back to the sheller for a second pass. A pearler would perform the actual milling operation of separating the bran from the kernel, giving it a white color by a three step, rubbing process using abrasive stones, coarse screens, metal rollers and water polishing.







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