**Dismissed as a joke, UK’s first rice crop ripe for picking after hot summer**
*By Georgina Rannard, Climate and Science Correspondent*
*and Gwyndaf Hughes, Climate and Science Videographer*
In an ordinary field in a quiet part of east England, a unique experiment is taking root.
“When I tell people what I’m doing here, they think I’m joking,” says Nadine Mitschunas, the UK’s first and only rice-grower.
The crops in four small paddy fields are doing well, helped by basking in our hottest summer on record.
“We could never have contemplated this would grow here,” says farmer Sarah Taylor, whose land the rice is planted on.
“Not in a million years,” her husband Craig adds.
This young crop is part of an ambitious trial to see what foods Britain could grow in the future. The trial aims to answer big questions about how we can produce enough food and protect farmers’ livelihoods in a world being altered by climate change.
The BBC got a sneak peek at the rice plants before harvest.
Rice plants look a lot like thick grass. Running up the stalks are small beads—these are the rice grains. They were still brown when we visited but will be picked when they turn white.
Nadine, an award-winning ecologist, is incredibly proud. “I’m actually amazed because they are big, happy, bushy plants,” she says, warning me not to fall over when we step into the calf-deep water. She points out her favourites.
“This is Estrella from Colombia, the best one so far,” she says.
“But I’m least impressed with this,” she adds, gesturing to a Japanese rice variety that has not flowered.
This experiment is the brainchild of the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH), in partnership with Craig and Sarah Taylor. Dozens of plants were planted in four mini paddy fields, dug out and flooded on the Taylors’ farm a few miles north of Ely in Cambridgeshire.
We often think of rice as a tropical plant, but it can grow in colder climates too. Nine varieties are growing, including ones from Brazil, Colombia, Italy, and the Philippines. These include some of the stars of the rice world: risotto, basmati, and sushi rice.
The plants thrived in the hot, sunny summer, which the Met Office says was the hottest in the UK since records began in 1884.
“In 10 years’ time, rice could be a completely perfect crop for us,” Nadine says.
This is the very edge of where rice can grow at the moment, and it would be a risky crop for farmers to plant commercially, says Professor Richard Pywell, who is leading the project for UKCEH. But Britain’s climate is changing quickly. If annual average temperatures warm by between 2 and 4°C compared to pre-industrial levels—a scenario many scientists say is likely—rice could be grown widely in the UK, according to research.
But this project is about more than growing British rice for our dinner plates. It could also help the UK tackle climate change.
The land in the Fens is some of the most productive in the UK. A third of the vegetables grown in Britain come from here, with a value of around £1.2 billion per year. But this productivity has a significant environmental and climate cost.
The farms are on rich peat soil that used to be underwater but is now slowly drying out. That drying releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change. Nationally, peat soils account for 3% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions. This process is also degrading soil quality, a change that farmers like Craig and Sarah witness in real time.
“All my ancestors were Fenmen. I love this place. We’ve been here for 500 plus years,” says Craig.
The rice field is surrounded by potato, onion, and beet crops, which remain the thriving staples here. Digging up a healthy clump of potatoes from the rich, black soil, Craig comments, “Potatoes are an amazing crop. You can’t knock that. But we know things need to change.”
“We don’t want people thinking we’re the ‘crazy rice farmers.’ This is about rethinking the whole system and making it work for everyone,” he adds.
Unpredictable weather patterns in recent years have affected farmers nationally, impacting harvests and crop yields in some cases.
“We see that the future isn’t stable. We want to be able to write our own destiny and not have it decided for us,” says Sarah. “Our legacy for our children and hopefully their children is really important to us, and I want them to know that we at least try to make a difference.”
As well as rice, the team is trialling other crops, including lettuce and hybrid willow that grow in waterlogged conditions. By flooding the peat soils in parts of Cambridgeshire, greenhouse gases could remain locked in the wet soil, cutting off a major source of emissions.
Even though growing rice produces methane—a potent greenhouse gas—initial results from the trials suggest the rice crop is not producing more emissions than it helps lock away.
The government is interested in what happens here too, with officials from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) having visited the site.
This could be a radical breakthrough in one of the thorniest questions in the UK: how to protect farming and food supplies while also addressing their huge impacts on the environment and climate.
The UK food system, including imports, accounts for 38% of UK greenhouse gas emissions, while agriculture alone contributes 11.7%. Growing rice on peat soils won’t fix those figures overnight, but it could provide a model for sustainable farming in the future.
“We’re at a critical juncture in climate change and we need to make decisions. We need to understand what sort of crops we could potentially grow in the future,” explains Richard from UKCEH. “In other areas, we may continue to grow our conventional crops, but under different conditions.”
Growing rice domestically sounds simple, but this is a complicated project with big ambitions. It will still be some time before we can test-taste a UK-grown rice crop, but it’s a very real possibility that in the next decade, UK-grown rice could be coming to our dinner plates.
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