On-again off-again promises of biotech rice spurred research to see if rice will grow in northern Missouri. 

Over the past 2 years, researchers have successfully grown rice in north Missouri at the University of Missouri’s Greenley Research Center in Knox County and at Hundley-Whaley Research Farm in Gentry County.

“Rice here has yielded upwards of 200 bushels per acre,” said Randy Smoot, superintendent, Greenley Research Farm. “Long-season varieties did not perform very well, but shorter-season varieties did very well and the hybrids yielded even better.”

“Based on just 2 years of observations, I’d say rice has some commercial potential in northwest Missouri,” said Bruce Burdick of rice grown at Hundley-Whaley. “We checked more commercial lines in 2006, and early maturing varieties look very good.”

There’s some precedent for growing rice this far north. For about 35 years ending in the mid-1970s, producers grew rice in the Mississippi River bottomlands of Marion County, Mo., and achieved respectable yields. In the 1940s, University of Missouri plant breeders developed a new short-grain rice variety, MO R-500, on the farm of Lester Cook, Jr., near Palmyra.

But for whatever reasons, not much rice has been grown north of Interstate 70 since about 1975—until 2005, when research trials were established at Greenley and Hundley-Whaley. This latter-day rice research was prompted in large part by Ventria Bioscience, a California-based biotech company. Ventria has genetically modified rice to produce lactoferrin and lysozyme, proteins and enzymes that occur naturally in human milk and tears and that are used in plant-made pharmaceutical products.

“We wanted to grow [genetically modified] rice in an area well separated from traditional rice country to avoid any cross-contamination with conventional rice,” said Somen Nandi, Ventria’s director of molecular breeding. “We were trying to learn what varieties of rice do best in northeast and northwest Missouri. We would select those varieties that perform best to use in our breeding programs.”

Two years ago, Ventria had big plans for rice grown in northern Missouri, as much as several thousand acres. Northwest Missouri State University agreed to build an extraction facility at the NMSU campus at Maryville. But Ventria needed more capacity in the short term than funding would pay for, so the company folded up its Missouri show and moved to Kansas.

Not everyone in Missouri was sorry to see them go. Rice farmers in the Mississippi Delta had protested Ventria’s expansion into the Midwest, as had Riceland Foods, Inc., the big rice cooperative. Anheuser-Busch, the St. Louis-based brewer and the country’s largest rice buyer, even threatened to boycott Missouri-grown rice if Ventria’s initial plan became a reality. All of these protests centered on the concern that Ventria’s GMO rice might contaminate commercial rice production.

As it turned out, those concerns were not misplaced, although the contamination came from a different source. Last year, some conventional rice grown in Missouri and Arkansas was found to contain a genetically-altered gene, LLRICE601, that makes rice resistant to the herbicide Liberty.

Although both USDA and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said the GMO rice poses no risks to human health or food safety, Japan and several European countries have banned imports of long-grain rice from the United States. Other overseas customers demand expensive testing to insure that their rice is free of the wayward gene. The effect of this interruption to the rice export market was $1.50 per hundredweight drop in prices.

“This comes just as the rice market was recovering,” said Sonny Martin, chairman of the Missouri Rice Research and Merchandising Council. Martin and his family grow rice in Stoddard County and run a rice milling operation in Bernie, Mo. “The U.S. rice industry has lost $125 million or so as a result of this contamination,” said Martin.

Several rice growers in Missouri and Arkansas have brought class-action lawsuits again Bayer CropScience, which field-tested the LLRICE601 gene from 1998 through 2001. But the source of the contamination remains a mystery at this point.

Despite the pull-out of Ventria Bioscience, researchers in northern Missouri aren’t ready to stop growing rice just yet—and they aren’t planning to grade the rolling hills into level rice pans.

“In another year, we plan to grow rice under center-pivot irrigation,” said Bruce Burdick at Hundley-Whaley Research Center. “We think that will work.”

It very well may, guesses Brian Ottis, UMC rice agronomist at the Delta Center, who notes that several rice growers in the Missouri Bootheel grow the crop with furrow irrigation.

“Rice is an aquatic plant, but the main reason for flooding rice is to suppress weeds and put plant nutrients into solution so the rice can take them up easier,” said Ottis. “We’ve looked at drip irrigation with floodless rice for the past 2 years. The water savings are significant with drip irrigation, compared with keeping a flood on the rice, and fertilizer applications can be made directly through the system.”

If drip irrigation lives up to its early promise, it could bring rice production to non-conventional upland areas, Ottis believes.