In the unlikely event that you successfully grow and harvest rice in New York City, a much larger challenge awaits: How do you remove the hard shell, called a hull or husk, that surrounds each grain?
According to Nick Storrs, who, as the manager of Randall’s Island Urban Farm, is responsible for all five of New York City’s rice paddies, “This is the stumbling block.” Forget climate, land shortages, lack of rice-growing experience, or any of the other reasons that you might hesitate before trying to grow rice in the city—the real problem is that “rice is literally super-hard.”
Large-scale Californian and Arkansan growers have a machine that takes care of this. Rice-A-Roni’s workers are not pounding each kernel by hand; indeed, they haven’t had to since the invention of the Engelberg huller, in 1888. The problem is that these industrial rice-processing machines are built to process thousands of pounds an hour, and cost upwards of twenty thousand dollars.
The tough light-brown shells that protect rice kernels from water damage, pests, and fungal diseases are both much harder and more indigestible to humans than their wheat, spelt, and barley chaff equivalents. Rice hulls are unique in nature, made of a silica structure that agronomists describe as a “biogenic opal”—a plant-made mineral that stands between a rice kernel and its would-be consumer. I did not yet know this when Storrs gave me a handful of unhulled paddy rice from the 2013 harvest and I nearly chipped a tooth.
Randall’s Island Urban Farm offers its Edible Education program to three thousand students from the Bronx and East Harlem each year. Like most of the city’s community gardens, the one-acre farm started out growing tomatoes, squash, strawberries, and chickens—the perennial favorites of urban agriculture, prized for their relative ease of cultivation and instant rewards. Unlike rice and other grains, the students can enjoy most of the delicious produce they grow and harvest right then and there, with little or nothing in the way of processing necessary.
Nonetheless, in early 2011, EunYoung Sebazco, Randall Island’s assistant horticulture manager, noticed that Hokkaido, the traditional northern limit of rice growing in Japan, was two full degrees of latitude farther north than New York City. In the United States, rice is only cultivated commercially in southern states, but, inspired by the northern rice she saw in Japan, Sebazco began researching the feasibility of growing rice on Randall’s Island. Meanwhile, Storrs began to realize that for much of the demographic that the farm serves—children whose families immigrated from the Dominican Republic, Latin America, and Jamaica—rice is a traditional staple. Yet most of the kids—indeed, most North Americans—have never seen a rice plant.
So, with Sebazco’s grandmother offering advice by phone from Korea, the farm’s volunteers built a tiny test paddy from used bricks and a painter’s tarp from Home Depot. Plastic and cinder-block foundations aside, the paddy was designed to resemble a traditional Japanese Edo-period rice field as closely as possible, with a carefully engineered irrigation system and a handful of complementary plants, including morning-glory vines, added for good measure. To deal with the Northeast’s shorter growing season, Storrs and his students germinated Koshihikari (a premium sushi-grade rice) seedlings in a greenhouse before transplanting them to the paddy, where they threw in some pet-store goldfish as a scaled-down substitute for the larger tilapia that Sebazco’s grandmother recommended. To everyone but Storrs and Sebazco’s disbelief, at the end of the season, New York City’s first rice paddy yielded a bumper harvest of fifteen pounds. And then they had to hull it.
As Sara Pitzer, the author of the small-scale grain grower’s bible “Homegrown Whole Grains,” writes, “even gardeners most lyrical about the joys of growing rice admit that hulling is nothing but pure chore.” Fortunately, Storrs had access to a ready supply of child labor, and shifts of New York City schoolchildren were soon happily pounding rice grains with a pestle and mortar, then tossing them in the air in front of a fan to winnow the chaff.
Smashing and throwing rice is good fun, but inefficient: the loss rate from the overly enthusiastic rice tossing was large, and, Storrs admitted, “Our first batch of cooked rice, while delicious, was extremely crunchy,” thanks to all the unhulled kernels that slipped through.
Intrigued by this early success, and looking for tips on tackling the hulling challenge, Storrs and Sebazco starting looking for fellow small-scale rice farmers online, and quickly realized that while they were the only ones growing rice in New York City, they had somehow joined the leading edge of a new agricultural movement: Ecological Rice Farming in the Northeastern USA.
Supported by an innovation grant from the U.S.D.A.’s Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education fund, Linda and Takeshi Akaogi had begun experimenting with rice cultivation on a wet patch of their Vermont farm in 2006. With the help of Cornell University’s McCouch RiceLab, they eventually produced more than two tons per acre—a commercially acceptable yield—and shared their success with thirty others at the ambitiously named First Annual Northeast USA Rice Conference, in 2009. Vermont now produces several thousand of pounds of rice per year at a handful of farms, and more than a hundred people attended the 2013 conference, including curious farmers from as far north as Nova Scotia.
This burgeoning Northeastern rice-growing community is itself part of a larger trend toward local grains of all sorts. Having impressed upon chefs and consumers the importance of eating locally produced fruit, vegetables, eggs, and dairy, phase two of the locavore movement aims to do the same with the less glamorous commodity crops, such as wheat and rice. According to its supporters, the benefits of smaller-scale, regional grain production are myriad: shortened, more resilient supply chains and fresher products, the opportunity to grow heirloom or custom-bred grains that are better-suited to local conditions and offer consumers a new taste of place, and the ecological advantages of biodiverse agriculture. Rice, in particular, offers Northeastern farmers the opportunity to maintain environmentally important wetlands productively, rather than losing money by leaving them fallow or draining them to grow something else. Unsurprisingly, these small-scale rice-growing pioneers all found themselves running into the same problem that Storrs had faced: How could they hull their rice?
Enter Don Brill, the undisputed star of the 2013 Northeast USA Rice Conference. Brill’s day job is as a microscopist at DuPont, but he is known within the Northeastern rice community as the “rice engineer”—an open-source, proto-John Deere for commercially neglected urban and smaller-scale rice farmers. His hand-built rice processors incorporate vacuum cleaners, kitchen utensils, and car parts, process up to sixty pounds of rice per hour, and cost well under a thousand dollars, with delivery and setup included. (Brill gives away the plans on his Web site for free, and has even compiled a helpful shopping list at McMaster-Carr.)
Earlier this year, Randall’s Island Urban Farm ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to raise seven hundred and fifty dollars to acquire one of Brill’s bicycle-powered hullers. On a sunny Saturday a few weeks ago, I biked out to Randall’s Island to witness its delivery.
As it turned out, Brill, his wife, and I were early, so I had a chance to ask how a middle-aged research associate at a giant pharmaceutical company with a degree in history became the Rube Goldberg of rice. “A few years ago, my son called and said, ‘Dad, I got a problem,’ ” Brill told me. Josh, as Brill, Jr., is called, had grown a couple hundred pounds of rice in Vermont, but when he looked around online for information about how to hull it, he saw that even the cheapest, most basic machine cost six thousand dollars.
“I told him I would get to within ten per cent of that, and then I searched for something to copy,” Brill continued. “And there was nothing.”
“That winter, he turned our basement into a shop full of failed rice hullers,” Brill’s wife, who had joined him for the trip to New York City, said.
“There was a lot of trial and a lot of error,” Brill said. It took two years for him to crack the huller, during which time he developed a custom spoke mechanism, found exactly the right foam pad in a boat-supply store, and cannibalized various home appliances for parts. He now offers designs for a table-top huller, capable of milling four pounds per hour; a bike-powered version, which can process up to twenty pounds; and a larger one, powered by the motor from a clothes dryer, on which his son was eventually able to process six hundred pounds.
Still, Brill’s machines are far from a finished product. He told me that he had made and delivered three bike-powered hullers thus far, and all were different. “It’s iterative,” he said, standing back to appraise the thigh-high chipboard contraption he had built for Randall’s Island Urban Farm. “But this one is pretty slick.”
At this point, Storrs arrived, with a small pink bike in tow, and the talk turned technical. Storrs, an open-faced young man in a floppy straw hat, was visibly excited. “This is freaking amazing,” he kept saying, with an enormous smile on his face. Brill, meanwhile, tensed up ever so slightly during the setup and adjustment, tweaking chains, rubber bands, and bolts to fit the bike height to the roller mechanism. “You want to make the gap between the rollers a little too wide at the start, to sneak up on the rice,” he instructed Storrs.
Finally, Storrs produced a bag of last year’s “paddy,” or unprocessed, rice, poured it into the hopper at the top of the machine, and climbed aboard the pink bike. Brill kneeled on the ground, glasses pressed up against the Perspex-sided roller mechanism. “Is there a particular speed I’m aiming for?” Storrs asked. “Just pedal,” Brill replied, and Storrs did, his knees splayed sideways on the undersized frame. I realized that I was holding my breath.
“Would you look at that!” Brill exclaimed. “A hundred-per-cent hull rate!” The rollers had removed the hulls from every single grain of rice the first time. The mood quickly became celebratory, and we each took a turn on the bike. Storrs asked whether it might be possible to attach an odometer so that students can see how far they need to ride to hull each pound of rice. Brill dispensed maintenance tips, I discussed sightseeing plans with his wife, and, all the while, freshly milled kernels of New York City’s only truly local rice poured into a beige plastic bus tray. “This is actually easier than growing it!” Storrs exclaimed, delighted.
As we put the huller and bike away, to await this fall’s rice harvest, Brill took one last look at his machine. “You know, next time I’m going to try an adjustable slope for the flow-in,” he said, talking to no one in particular.
Nicola Twilley is the author of Edible Geography, a blog that looks at food from all sorts of unlikely angles. She is currently working on a book about artificial refrigeration.
Photograph by Nicola Twilley.
