92 Atlantic African, American, and European Backgrounds to Contact, Commerce, and Enslavementsupplanted the drudgery that made rice cultivation oner-
ous for centuries.
See also: Bunce Island; Carolinas; Gullah; Sierra Leone;
Sweetgrass Baskets; Task SystemChristopher Martin CumoBibliography
Dethloff , Henry C. A History of the American Rice Industry, 1 685–
19 85. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1988.
Doar, David. Rice and Rice Planting in the South Carolina Low
Country. Charleston, SC: Charleston Museum, 1936.
Heyward, Duncan Clinch. Seed from Madagascar. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1937.
Lawson, Dennis T. No Heir to Take Its Place: Th e Story of Rice in
Georgetown County, South Carolina. Georgetown, SC: Th e
Rice Museum, 1972.
Littlefi eld, Daniel C. Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade
in Colonial South Carolina. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1981.
Nuttonson, M. Y. Rice Culture and Rice-Climate Relationships with
Special Reference to the United States Rice Areas and Th eir Lat-
itudinal and Th ermal Analogues in Other Countries. Wa s h -
ington, D.C.: American Institute of Crop Ecology, 1965.
Salley Jr., Alexander S. Th e Introduction of Rice Culture into South
Carolina. Columbia: South Carolina Historical Commission,
1919.
Smith, C., Wayne, and Robert H. Dilday, eds. Rice: Origin, His-
tory, Technology, and Production. New York: John Wiley and
Sons, 2003.River in the 1850s used the steam engine to pump water
from the river to their fi elds. Rice cultivation, long the prov-
ince of the Carolina coast, had swept west. In 1892, agricul-
tural scientist Seaman A. Knapp emphasized that farmers
could cultivate rice with the same machinery they used on
wheat. Th at year Knapp estimated that mechanization had
made rice farmers 300 percent more effi cient than they had
been only fi ve years earlier. In 1894, engineers A. D. Mc-
Farlain and C. L. Shaw formed the fi rst irrigation and canal
company in Louisiana to bring water to rice farmers. By
1898, the McFarlain Irrigation Company and its competi-
tors had dug 150 miles of canals that served 55,000 acres of
paddy in Acadia Parish, Louisiana. By 1900, 25 canal com-
panies operated in Louisiana. From Louisiana, rice spread
to Arkansas and Texas. In 1903, the Arkansas Agricultural
Experiment Station began to compare diff erent methods
of irrigating rice. By then scientists had begun to experi-
ment with vacuum pumps to draw water from the surface
or from an underground well.
During the 20th century, machines and chemicals
pervaded all aspects of rice culture. Tractors equipped
with disks and lasers can level soil at a slope of 2 vertical
feet for every 1,000 feet of horizontal surface. Levee plows
build embankments. Twenty-four-row planters drill seed
into the soil. Herbicides keep weeds at bay. Technology
Slaves unloading rice barges in South Carolina. (North Wind Picture Archive)