In the heart of Louisiana, about 100 miles north of Baton Rouge, lies the rain-soaked farm that lured Konda Mason away from California in 2020. Reflecting on her journey to the South, the entrepreneur and spiritual teacher has no regrets about relocating from Oakland to the small city of Alexandria to start growing rice. She chuckles while explaining how she got there: in an RV with two loved ones and two dogs. But a hint of frustration creeps into her voice when she talks about the weather.
“Right now, it’s too wet for us to get into the field with a tractor,” she explained the night after a thunderstorm this summer. “We’ve had very few days where we can go into the field so far this year, and that is problematic.”
Mason is the founder of Jubilee Justice, a nonprofit that helps small-holder Black farmers in the South grow specialty rice with the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), a “dry-land” method developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead of growing rice in flooded paddies to prevent weeds from overtaking the crop, SRI farmers treat rice like a vegetable, irrigating it as needed and using other weed control methods.
“What we’re doing [at Jubilee Justice] is reclaiming rice and rice farming as our foodways, as our invention, as our birthright—and in that is nothing but the spirit of the ancestors.”
Created on Madagascar and practiced in about 60 countries today, SRI has been shown to increase grain yields, sometimes twofold. The method also tackles the significant climate impact of conventional rice production. Methane emissions created by flooded rice paddies account for about 10 percent of global agricultural emissions. That’s because so much rice is grown around the world: Roughly 11 percent of all arable land is devoted to this crop, a daily staple for half the people on Earth.
Per calorie, though, rice produces fewer emissions than most staple foods, including meat, fish, eggs, dairy, and even other grains like wheat and corn. And growing rice with SRI can cut those emissions nearly in half. (Rice has other issues, namely that it can contain high amounts of arsenic, depending on the variety and where it’s grown; however, rice grown under drier conditions, like SRI, likely has less arsenic.)
Despite all the advantages of SRI, it’s scarcely practiced in the U.S. because it requires specialized equipment, involves a lot more labor, and is extremely difficult to pull off. “That’s why people think we’re crazy,” Mason said.
But she has powerful reasons to focus on rice despite the challenges. For Mason, rice represents a way to transform lives and reclaim the past, offering a path toward racial, economic, and climate justice.
A Flow of Knowledge
Jubilee Justice’s rice program, called the Black Farmers Cohort, currently consists of 10 farmers from Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Kentucky. Collectively, they cultivate seven different varieties, including the organization’s signatures: “Black Joy,” “Creole Country Red,” “Black Belt Sticky,” and “Jubilee Justice Jasmine.” The team in Alexandria is testing 20 more varieties at their 17-acre farm, located on a former cotton plantation that serves as the central research hub for crop and equipment trials. Mason notes that knowledge flows out as much as it flows in, because everyone is learning.
At the Jubilee Justice farm in Alexandria, Louisiana, rice is farmed with a “dry-land” method called System of Rice Intensification (SRI). (Photo courtesy of Jubilee Justice)
“We are basically figuring it out year by year,” explained Erika Styger, director of the Climate-Resilient Farming Systems Program at Cornell University. A leading provider of SRI technical assistance to small-holder farmers worldwide, Styger has been a Jubilee Justice advisor since the Black Farmers Cohort began in 2019.
Jublilee Justice is the only organization in the U.S. “actively implementing and systematically researching the [SRI] method organically, regeneratively, and in collaboration with multiple farmers,” she said. Essentially, these farmers are the vanguards of a grand Southern experiment—part of what makes their work so challenging.
SRI can take years to adjust to a single farming operation and microclimate, Styger said, and having farmers around who have already done it successfully and can share their wisdom minimizes a “difficult” and “fragile” learning period. Being the first ones to pursue SRI on U.S. soil, Jubilee Justice doesn’t have this option.
“It takes a lot of knowledge and fine-tuning, and you need to be ready to adapt to different situations,” she added. Styger thinks the growing pains are worth it, though: “In the long run, of course, you’re building a much-improved system that will be able to withstand climate change much better.”
With SRI, farmers can cut by half the typical 800 to 5,000 liters of water used to grow one kilogram of rice, resulting in a 43 percent reduction in methane emissions, according to a brief by Styger and her Cornell colleague Norman Uphoff. While SRI may slightly increase nitrous oxide emissions, Styger and Uphoff found its advantages outweigh the potential downsides: SRI has been shown to lower the global warming potential of rice production by 25 percent on average.
Caryl Levine, co-founder of Lotus Foods, a California-based company specializing in SRI with farmers in Asia and Southeast Asia, says dryland rice farming is gaining popularity because “it’s much more regenerative” than conventional flooding. Still, it’s taken decades for the practice to spread.
Lotus Foods primarily works with farmers overseas, but teamed up with Mason to work on bringing Jubilee Justice rice to market. “It was a long-term goal of Lotus Foods to work with domestic farmers who are willing to use SRI practices,” Levine has said. With as many challenges as successes these past four years, the Black Farmers Cohort has yet to meet the volume threshold for Lotus to put their rice on grocery store shelves. Mason remains optimistic, though, saying, “We’re getting there.” In November, her farm in Alexandria achieved a milestone by harvesting its first full acre of rice after three years of smaller trials, marking their best harvest yet.
Jubilee Justice supplies farmers who are a part of the Black Farmers Cohort with everything they need to get started with SRI, including seeds, equipment, minerals, fertilizers, labor support, and technical assistance. In addition to funding from small family foundations, the organization received a $500,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 2021.
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