Arkansan Chris Isbell: America's Pioneering Premium Sake Rice Farmer, Part II
As promised, I am bringing you Part II of my post on Arkansas rice farmer Chris Isbell, patriarch of Isbell Farms. In addition to growing long- and medium-grain rice for the U.S. and global markets, he has cultivated a strong sideline in Japanese rice: not only short-grain sushi and table rice, but in recent years, sake rice as well.
In Part I, I introduced you to Isbell and his prize-winning Yamada Nishiki, as well as his ongoing experimentations with Omachi, Gohyakumangoku, and Wataribune. He’s also introduced a new table rice variety, SoMai, that is well suited to sake brewing. (If you haven’t already, I suggest checking out Saké One’s outstanding Naginata junmai daiginjo, which is brewed solely with Isbell’s Yamada Nishiki rice.) I also mentioned that period of time when Isbell was a bona fide rice-growing celebrity in Japan, which is where I will start off in this post.
That Isbell’s Japanese rice fame came to pass at all is due to the fact that he is a curious fellow who’s always trying to up his game. He was one of the only farmers at a late 1980s meeting of the Rice Technical Working Group, where academics share information on various aspects of their rice research. Isbell happened to notice a lone Japanese attendee, and struck up a conversation. The man, Shoichi Ito, a rice economist at Tottori University, began regaling Isbell with tales of a delicious Japanese short-grain rice called Koshihikari, developed in the 1950s and now the most widely cultivated rice in Japan. Ito explained that it was difficult to grow, especially outside of its native Japan.
Isbell hasn’t retained many of the details. But what he does remember is thinking to himself, “I bet I can grow it.” He decided he’d take on the challenge. Little did he know that this experiment would give him a whole different way of looking at and thinking about rice.
Back then, quality control for rice farmers in America pretty much began and ended with separating broken rice from whole grains, Isbell recalls. “As far as taste, texture, whether it was grown in Texas or Arkansas,” we never thought about those differences,” he says. As we know, Japanese have a different relationship to rice, one that’s, well, much more granular. When I—a Californian reared on Calrose, and later, Tamanishiki rice—moved to Japan for a few years in my 20s, I stayed for a time with tea merchant friends of my family. I could not get over how delicious the rice they served tasted, sticky as I expected, yet with a better bite and a delicate flavor. When I moved to my own apartment, I ordered my rice from that same purveyor to my host family, buying both its white and brown rice. The latter was just as much of a taste revelation as the former.
In about 1989, Isbell began growing out the Koshihikari seeds he got from both Japan and from GRIN, the Global Germplasm Information Network . By 1992, he was selling his crop to Nishimoto Trading Company in California, and from there, it made its way to Japan. He recalls trying to interest a rep from Mitsubishi Trading Company in a taste test of his Koshihikari. He got nowhere, because Mitsubishi was sure that high-quality American Koshihikari was an agricultural impossibility. Years later, Isbell found himself in a meeting room at Mitsubishi headquarters in Tokyo, where he was offered an exclusive deal to market his Arkansas-grown Koshihikari. But by then it was too late; he had found his export partner in the Itochu Corporation.
The early 1990s were the celebrity years for Isbell and his farm (cue the montage reel!). He counted a total of 100 articles written about him in the Japanese press, which in turn brought Japanese tourists by the Greyhound bus load. Every week would bring new batch of Japanese visitors. A film crew from Japanese broadcaster NHK embedded at the farm for a year to make a 90-minute documentary on Isbell and his farm, covering the entire life cycle of his Koshihikari from planting to marketing. Isbell remembers being flown to Los Angeles and stepping onto the tarmac to be met by a film crew, just like in celebrity biopics. “Here I am a rice farmer, and people were wondering, Who is this guy?” It may sound glamorous but in fact, he says, “I don’t like that sort of thing.”
All of this came to an end in the mid-1990s, when the U.S. government forced Japan to remove its ban on rice importation. California growers, seeing an opportunity and leveraging their relative proximity to Japan, went all in on the market. Yet when California Koshihikari rice was sent to Japan it was mixed with Japanese grown-rice and sold; only Isbell’s had the cachet to be marketed as a single-origin rice, with his name on it.
Japanese rice farmers protested American rice imports. “It was sensitive,” Isbell acknowledges, “but I never felt it was personal. I felt a kinship with Japanese farmers because we go through the same things: the weather’s bad, the market’s bad….” He recalls being in Japan at the invitation of the Japanese government, and fêted at an event in Sendai in front of close to 900 people. One Japanese farmer stood up and said, “My son is in the seventh grade. He wants to know why, when Japan is self-sufficient in rice growing, we should buy rice from the U.S.?” Isbell paused for a moment and then answered, “I respect your opinion and I agree with you, because in my opinion this is a national security issue. But the U.S. is self-sufficient in automobiles, and we buy Japanese cars.” There was a long silence as the translator completed rendering his answer in Japanese. Suddenly the room broke out into laughter and Isbell felt relieved: “the tension was broken,” he recalls.
It was this experience, seeing a lucrative new market being taken away by California competitors, that has made Isbell a bit wary of sharing too much information. In Part I, I mentioned that he was reluctant to go into the details of his SoMai hybrid’s parentage. When it comes to a breed he’s coaxed into being over years of selection and experimentation, he’d prefer to keep the details proprietary for now.
I also wanted to tell you a bit about Isbell’s innovations in sustainability. Long before the terms “sustainable farming” or “sustainability” became buzzwords, the Isbells were practicing it, under the banner of what they called good land stewardship.
You can read about their innovations in Zero Grade technology (leveling all fields until they are as flat as pancakes), a method that they’ve been perfecting since the ‘60s, which saves 30 to 50 percent in water usage for rice production. Zero Grade technology has made possible a system of water management known as AWD or Alternate Wetting and Drying. This allows for periods in which top soils dries out instead of staying constantly wet. The field’s anaerobic (oxygen-free) environment turns aerobic for a span of time, which reduces the amount of methane, or greenhouse gas, that microbes in the soil produce. “We’ve reduced methane production by sixty-four percent,” says Isbell. This has allowed his farm to sell carbon credits to Microsoft. The farm is now in its fifth year of a multi-year research study with the University of Arkansas and the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service monitoring methane and nitrous oxide emissions from its fields.
The Isbell family also runs its own solar farm and saves energy with a computerized grain drying technology that prioritizes natural air drying.
But there’s a new kind of energy on the farm that Isbell is excited about today—generated by the entry of his grandkids into the business. Grandchildren Harrison and Alayna have developed the farm’s YouTube channel, with Harrison serving as guide to doings on the farm and Alayna editing. Isbell’s daughter Whitney and son Mark help with story idea generation and promotion. Son-in-law Jeremy and nephew Shane have also lent a hand in creating social media posts for the farm.
In the first video, Harrison takes viewers inside a huge rice bin to take a sample and check its moisture level, and shows the removal of a tool shop air conditioner with a backhoe. Through the series, viewers learn about flooding on the farm, tractors getting stuck in mud and other real-life travails of a rice farmer, as well as family life on the farm.
I also learned about a somewhat hidden talent the family shares. Chris grew up harmonizing with his mother, Luverne Isbell, and his sister. Luverne was a successful southern gospel songwriter, and Isbell family members all play instruments. During the last weeks of his mother’s battle with cancer, the family did all it could to keep Luverne comfortable, furnishing her room with a piano, mandolin and guitar. “Just about every evening, I would go by, Isbell recalls, “and she would say, ‘Are we going to have a celebration tonight?’ The whole family would go down there and play music until it was time to go to sleep,” he recalls. “I think I sang every song I know.”
I hope you enjoyed this peek into the rich life of an extraordinary farming family as much as I have. Please continue to let me know what you’d like to read about in upcoming posts and I will try to oblige!
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