
My first thoughts of rice being grown in Texas was in agronomy class at Texas Tech when Dr. Clark Harvey told the class about rice in the state. Raised on the High Plains near Lubbock, I could not imagine that much water in Texas, and I had my doubts of the state having enough water to raise rice.
I didn’t give it another thought for years as I had a job in a new and expanding field of hybrid sorghum. I worked in seed production and then in research. The job required travel from South Texas all the way to South Dakota in the winters, then work in Puerto Rico. That was hard to do with my young family, so I was glad when offered a job where I could return to Texas.
In Texas working with seed certification, one project was questions of purity problems with foundation seed of two new rice varieties. That was when my boots waded an actual Texas rice field. One thing led to another, and in 1975, I was offered a job in El Campo at a seed rice company. Visiting with local farmers, I learned the many and varied problems they faced.
Not long after we moved, I met Reed Green and Fred Miller. They were both entomologists and had recently set up a crop consulting business. Learning I was trained in agronomy, they asked me to join them. Soon, a farmer I worked for on soybeans asked if I could also help on rice.
There was one particular rice field a client planted and sprayed with propanil herbicide. It appeared to do a good job until we started to hold a flood. Then circular spots of grass about three to five feet in diameter showed up above the rice. They were not missed application streaks — just isolated random spots of barnyardgrass — about two to four per acre. Glume color, awn length, and leaf color all varied between spots. Closer examination revealed that all the plants in a spot had the same physical characteristics. To me, that showed that all in that spot were the progeny of a single plant of barnyardgrass that mutated and survived propanil applied in the previous rice crop.
Shortly after this incident, other farmers started to have problems killing barnyardgrass. I probably would not have recognized what was happening if I was not at the right place at the right time and had some training in genetics and the curiosity to recognize minor differences in plant characteristics and cultural patterns. Propanil-resistant barnyardgrass had never been reported in the U.S. After a few years, it was confirmed by scientists and published in scientific journals. My rice business grew, and things got really interesting, really fast.
Luck was that I had been working with a company that had a new herbicide with good grass activity. Farmers soon found that, under certain conditions, they sometimes had injury. Lots of work and lots of things to be learned!
I soon appreciated that, with rice, there were opportunities for control, or at least manipulations of plant culture, by water management. Rice and soybeans were my main crops with enough sorghum, corn, wheat, sunflower, sesame, flax, and turf keep it interesting.
The new profession of independent crop consulting was rapidly expanding, and members were trying to define its direction. I was a new member to a new profession that was largely made up of entomologists. Several of them recognized there needed to be a broader, multidisciplinary training and degree program. I joined them in an effort to build an education and degree similar to the veterinary profession.
We put together several proposals and made presentations at meetings of scientific societies. There was a lot of interest from potential students. Professors could not decide which department to fit it into. The high point of this effort was when I got to sit down with Dr. Norman Borlaug in his office and outline our proposal. He was very encouraging and agreed it was very needed.
There are now active programs in Florida and Nebraska, and I am happy to report there is still rice being grown in Texas!
— Dan Bradshaw
El Campo, Texas