Just Add
Fish
PORTION OF AGRICULTURE-RELATED GLOBAL
→10% HEATING CAUSED BY RICE CULTIVATION
BY Moises Velasquez-Manoff ILLUSTRATION BY Violet ReedNEXT TIME YOU SIT DOWN TO A BOWL OF
steaming rice, consider this: Of all the
grains humans eat, rice has the biggest car-
bon footprint. Of course, rice is a staple for
half of humanity, which partly explains the
outsize footprint. The big problem, though,
is that rice is usually grown in water, and
there’s not much oxygen in the muddy bot-
tom of a rice paddy. That low-oxygen muck
is a happy place for a type of bacteria that
produces methane. And each methane mol-
ecule can do far more harm to the climate
than a carbon dioxide molecule, contrib-
uting nearly 30 times more warming over
a 100-year span.
In other words, when you grow rice, you
also grow a lot of climate-heating bacteria.
One potential solution: fish. Experiments
by the nonprofit Resource Renewal Institute
suggest that introducing fish to rice paddies
kicks off a cascade of events that changes
the water’s bacterial communities and ends
with less methane leaking into the atmo-
sphere. The fix also offers up a different way
of thinking about how living systems con-
tribute to climate change.
If the project pans out, it could change rice
cultivation around the world. So it’s nota-
ble that the effort began almost acciden-
tally. The organization started its Fish in the
Fields project in 2012 to reduce overfishing
in the wild. “It was going well,” says Deborah
Moskowitz, the institute’s president. But in
2015, the outdoor-wear company Patago-_Rice has the biggest carbon footprint of
any grain. Bite by bite, tiny minnows can make it
much smaller.