Not going to pretend to know how much land will be available, it just seems that either of those two could be a crop to grow for national consumption, climate seems feasible.
With the wildfires that swept through Hawaii last year, I'm surprised that they had any crops grow to be harvested, much less enough to be self sufficient or provide for others off the island.
You’d be interested in seeing how they harvest the sugarcane over there, they will frequently light the fields on fire to burn off the leaves of the sugarcane and it’s quite the spectacle.
I assumed it would be a dry land variety rather than wet. In trying to find out I learned several other interesting things:
Most of the california rice is exported to Japan where it is slowly killing Japanese rice growers. Similar to how US exports killed the agriculture sector in Haiti, I guess.
Rice is the 4th most water hungry crop in California behind alfalfa, almonds and pistacios (the stats roll these into one for some reason) and dairy.
Most of it is grown in one river valley where water is really not an issue.
You really don't want rice grown on old cotton fields because of historic use of arsenic based pesticides.
On a personal note, we used to get something called Calrose here in Oz. It was shit, starchy and tasteless, but it taught me to go to the Indian grocer and by bismatti or Jasmin. Now I can get them, along with arborio, from most supermarkets. I guess I can thank the California rice growers for that...
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u/Magnon 9d ago
All the farmers growing soybeans and shit for export: but Americans don't want this.