- [Lucas] Rice grows everywhere.
From below sea level to highlands,
seven or eight thousand feet above.
It can function as essentially an aquatic marsh plant.
But some strains are highly drought resistant.
It can grow in 95 degree tropical weather without
any negative effect on yields
and also in temperatures as low as 40 degrees
in some areas of the Northern Hemisphere.
No other crop can grow in such
a wide ranging geographical area.
Today a handful of southern states
and California produce most of the 10 million tons
of rice annually that comes from the US.
In the 20th century a booming population led
to challenges for rice cultivators.
Issues like how to improve yields.
Increased resistance to disease and pests.
And create strains that would respond well
to irrigation and fertilizers.
Koda farms in Central California
has been adapting and innovating since
its beginnings in the late 1920s
and continues that tradition today.
The farm is still in the family
run by Robin Koda and her brother Ross.
Both grandchildren of Keisaburo Koda,
known as the rice king among Japanese Americans.
(upbeat music)
- [Lucas] This is your Kokuho Rose.
- Yes you're standing in a field
of our heirloom Kokuho Rose developed
on our farm here in the 1950s.
- You said that it grows taller
than your typical conventional rice strains
and you can see that as it waves and leans and very easily.
- [Robin] Flops over, lays down.
- [Lucas] Flops over.
- [Robin] Lays down as we say.
- And that makes it a real pain to harvest is that right?
- Right I mean when the grain lays down
it's harder for the harvester to pick up and thrush
and harvest so it's ideally not
a quality you want to perpetuate in a rice strain
but for us we feel that the downside
is insignificant compared to the payoff
which is that this rice is extremely flavorful
and has a lot of outstanding qualities.
And in California because of California's quote-unquote
Mediterranean climate you get one crop of rice.
If we were more equatorial and were subtropical
we could maybe get two crops of rice a year but
in California you get one crop of rice a year
and our harvest is in the fall.
So as Japanese we prefer to have the shinmai,
the new crop rice.
That is rice that has been harvested
and has been freshly milled.
At that point all the flavor nuances,
its bouquet will be at their best.
- [Lucas] Keisaburo Koda arrived in California in 1908.
After opening a series of businesses moved
with his family to the San Joaquin Valley
to start a farming venture in the late 1920s.
Anti-Asian sentiment was growing in the US at that time
and Asian immigrants were denied the right to own land.
But Koda put the land in the name
of his American born children.
For the next several years Koda's rice farm thrived.
He pioneered techniques such as sowing seed with airplanes
and his farming operation included a modern rice dryer
and mill that improved and streamlined
the farm to retail process.
- [Robin] So the rice when it comes to full maturity out
in the fields where we want to harvest it with combine.
So it's essentially your big grain harvesters.
They at that point have just the individual kernels of rice
in their husks and that rice
is then dumped into a pit at one of our two dryers.
That pit then transfers the rice
through augers up to a grain elevator.
That grain elevator's gonna take it
to the top of these towers.
- [Lucas] And so then it slowly dries
as it trickles down.
- [Robin] Right it's a very gentle long process.
It takes two sessions approximately 12 hours each.
It doesn't just come straight vertically down.
There are these baffles so that the rice has
to move slowly and to get the maximum exposure
to the hot air.
- Okay so what is this big jet engine looking thing here?
- To dry the rice we use natural gas.
When this is actually going you have
two rings here that blow out an immense amount
of gas and you'll see two huge jet flames blowing
into this big fan and this fan is rotating
and sucking the air up and dragging up
and it's eventually gonna make
its way up through the towers.
- Okay.
- But this is scary.
You don't wanna do any marshmallows.
They'll be incinerated instantly.
- And then from there?
- Directly to milling.
- [Lucas] In the late 1950s and early 60s
the Kodas spearheaded a rice breeding program
at the farm that resulted in a particularly tasty
medium grain variety called Kokuho Rose.
The rice was introduced to the domestic market
in 1963 and remains a respected
and highly sought after variety to this day.
I'm trying to manually pick
the husk off these individual kernels right now
and it's kind of long work.
- I know well good thing right?
Good thing we have the machines
or else it would be more expensive than caviar right?
So the rice essentially is in with the husk
which start on this end.
The rice straw and the husks have a high percent of silica.
They're extremely sturdy very rough fiber.
To strip the actual husk off
an individual kernel involves this machine
which has rubber rollers in it.
The rubber rollers are spinning
in opposite directions at slightly different speeds.
So the rice then is fed through that
and that friction causes the husk to be stripped off.
It's going to then go up.
- [Lucas] What's up?
- [Robin] What's up is where the rice
is polished if it's gonna be white rice.
Further separated.
The rice finally moves its way over
to what we call a color sorter.
You can then control your quality
by literally adjusting this machine
for whatever color you're looking for.
- [Lucas] So when you were a kid was this fun?
- Oh yeah it was fun because it was highly unregulated then.
You could just climb over everything like a monkey.
This is where we do some of our packagings.
It eventually works its way up
and depending on which line
it's going to feeds to either side.
So this is the actual trademark.
This again is a trademark that is loosely based
on Japanese anthology.
And then he adapted it for his purposes
to use this trademark Kokuho Rose.
- Cool.
And that's the story of rice.
- Part of it.
(laughing)
(relaxing music)
- [Lucas] Rice can be consumed in grain form
or ground into flour and formed into noodles.
It can be fried, steamed, and eaten in soup.
It can be dessert too in the form
of rice pudding or glutinous rice that's pounded
and formed into mochi.
Rice can be fermented and turned into sake and beer.
The combinations and different forms
in dishes rice is served in is nearly endless.
What are we drinkin'?
- The good (beeping).
- Tatenokawa.
Kanpai.
- Kanpai here's mud in your eye.
- [Lucas] Why don't we try some of the brown
and some of the white?
- If you say please.
- Please?
- Okay so we have a little bit of the white rice here.
And a little of the brown as well.
So this is a lot more nuttier full flavored.
The white rice is a lot more subtle so start with that.
Itadakimasu.
- How do I say that again?
- Itadakimasu.
- All right.
- Does it mean?
- It means.
- Bon Appétit?
- Bon Appétit hope you fall off a cliff tomorrow.
- Say you hope I fall off a cliff tomorrow?
Thanks Robin.
Mm.
- So the white has a slightly floral bouquet.
It has a slight natural sweet note
and it's just a tasty everyday eating rice.
- It's really nice and it's got as you mentioned
the rice has a high starch content so it does have
that nice tackiness and that nice stickiness.
- And incidentally just a side bar here
so a lot of risotto strains and Spanish Bomba strains
of rice actually have the Japonica in the genetic makeup
and that's what gives it the starch profiles.
- I'm gonna try some of this brown now.
- All right.
So you can see how it's a more earthly flavor.
It has a grassy note.
An earthy sort of nutty flavor.
All of this is the white rice not friction polished
and it's retaining the brown layer.
- It's almost like a slight little crunch little pop.
- That brown layer has most of the fiber content
so that's going to give it a different tooth mouth feel.
It has more fiber and that also
suppresses the starch release.
A lot of people who are diabetic who are
if they can't give up rice they'll switch
to brown rice because that suppresses the starch.
- I see what you mean
about the flavor of the rice.
It stands on its own.
The US declared war on Japan in 1941
and soon afterwards President Roosevelt
ordered Japanese Americans like
the Kodas sent to internment camps.
United States enters World War II.
President Roosevelt issues an executive order.
- Yes.
9066.
People of Japanese descent
whether you're American born or not.
Primarily the West Coast were sent to internet camps.
There really wasn't any other reason to put them there
other than that they were superficially visually
obviously different from the rest of the population.
I mean German Americans and Italian Americans
on the West Coast did not suffer the same consequences.
- Even though America was also at war with those countries.
- That's right.
- And this land.
This is not land that was originally part of Koda farms.
Is that correct?
- That's right.
On the outbreak of World War II owned
and operated about approximately 10,000 acres of farmland.
Because there was so much resentment against Asians
they felt that the best thing to do would be
to close the business and hope that it would stay intact.
The government actually stepped in and mandated
that they stay open under the pretense of producing fiber.
Had to sign over power of attorneys
to non-Asians and those people during
the internment essentially sold off all the acreage.
The milling plant, the farm, the houses.
So the family came back after the internment
to approximately 1000 acres of land and that was it.
- Down from 10,000 acres.
And everything else it was just gone.
I would imagine that would just be so crushing.
- When I look back on it.
The second generation,
the nisei who were raised in the American culture,
they were more affected by it.
But you know my grandfather was extremely tenacious.
- Your grandfather sued the government.
- He filed for reparations right.
At that time it was the biggest claim filed
in the US so that dragged on
until 1965.
He actually passed in 1964 so he didn't actually get
to see the settlement which was sad.
But then in another sense wasn't that big
of a deal because the settlement was so minuscule that
it didn't even begin to cover the attorney's fees
that they had accrued over literally more than a decade.
- Was there satisfaction that it was a symbolic victory?
- I think it was but you know on the other hand
my grandfather more so than his American born children.
He became a naturalized citizen in the 1950s
and he was very happy and very proud to achieve that status.
After the war he established
the first American Japanese agricultural training programs.
Exchange programs to promote goodwill between Japan
and the US and what essentially
that did was bring over young agricultural students
from Japan to the US.
They would spend a year here learning
about American agriculture which at that time
was very modern compared to Japan.
And then they would go back.
So anyway it was his way of promoting goodwill.
- It's very extraordinary to think about.
And I think it's something that not a lot of
that probably not a lot of people are aware of.