Show Me Rice
Design by Alex Povis. Illustrations by Lehel Kovacs.
Mike Martin knows when it’s time to flood.
He and his brothers, Tim and David, carefully monitor their 7,000 acres of farmland in southeast Missouri for signs of disease, weeds, insects, fungus and other agricultural perils. As third-generation farmers, they take their craft seriously; they test the soil every year and constantly walk the watery fields looking for anything that might harm their crop.
Agriculture runs on razor-thin margins, and one bad harvest can be detrimental to the entire operation, which, after half a century, counts more than 35 employees. Trucks, each bearing 44,000 pounds of rice, leave the farm daily – their contents bound for places as close as Springfield, Missouri, and as far away as Cuba and Taiwan.
Owners of Martin Rice Co. in Bernie, Missouri, the Martin brothers plant, harvest, mill and package jasmine, medium-grain and long-grain rice. “Rice is very common,” says Martin. “It’s not expensive. For what you get, rice is probably one of the most economical foods you can buy. But it’s hard to appreciate where it comes from or how it gets to your plate without learning how the process works. Most people don’t think about how elaborate [that] is: how hard it is to process and distribute [rice]. But it’s the world’s staple. Over half the population relies on rice as its main food [source]. So it’s something that at one level is taken for granted, but at another level, it’s demanded every day.”
The Martin family first settled in Bernie during the Great Depression. Martin’s grandfather moved his family from Arkansas in search of a better life, and the fertile land south of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, was a perfect place to farm. He didn’t know how he would pay for it, but he bought 160 acres and planted cotton, corn, soybeans, wheat and sorghum.
The area where the family farm is located was swampland for centuries until it was drained in the early 1900s and became famous for its Cyprus and oak trees. Timber companies scrambled to clear the land – building railroad tracks expressly for shipping the high-quality wood farther afield – but once all the trees were gone, the timber companies either sold their land or turned into cotton producers.
Because it was once a Mississippi River delta, the land is especially productive. This is aided even further by irrigation: An aquifer holds clean, pure water that can be reached through wells and used to water crops when needed. “It’s [like] a big garden down here where we’re at, just because of the weather that we have, the fertility of the soil and the water availability,” says Martin. “The water almost seems to replenish itself from one year to the next.”