that match the height of the wild rice 
plants. 
These mechanized marvels were the 
easy part. They just cost money, lots 
of money. The hard part was, and 
to a certain extent still is, finding a 
strain of Zizania aquatica that can 
be sown and reaped like any other 
cultivated grain. Over the years many 
Minnesotans tried to tame wild rice, 
but they all failed. The plant’s basic 
biology foiled them because the ma- 
ture seeds — the part we harvest and 
eat — shatter at maturity and fall off 
the stem. Worse, seeds of the same 
plant mature at different times, start- 
.* ing with the topmost and progressing 
downward along a spikelike cluster. 
For this reason, traditional lake har- 
d I vesting has to be done in several 
stages, with canoes passing through 
the same stand at intervals of several 
days, until all the seeds have matured 
and been knocked off their stems. 
The paddy rice farmers can only 
harvest once, since the combine chews 
off the plants’ entire spikes in one 
pass. For paddy production, then, the 
ideal wild rice plant would have seeds 
that did not shatter; that remained 
on the plant until the whole spike was 
ripe. 
Pioneers in the paddy business like 
Harold Kosbau scoured lake crops 
looking for naturally occurring, non- 
shattering strains. Eventually, they 
found them, planted them in paddies, 
and by 1972, they were in business. 
Last year paddy production had ex- 
panded to 2.2 million pounds, roughly 
80 percent of Minnesota’s overall crop. 
And in that same period, after a so- 
phisticated marketing effort by the 
paddy growers and by wild rice re- 
tailers, United States consumption tri- 
pled. Meanwhile, the retail price, es- 
pecially outside Minnesota, zoomed to 
a level at least as high as SI 7 a pound. 
The wild rice market is wilder than 
the plant. Mail-order sources charge 
widely divergent amounts, ranging 
from a low of $5 per pound to SI 4.50 
for ten ounces. 
To be sure, there are different 
grades of wild rice, from fancy long 
grain to broken debris, but these are 
unofficial ratings, rarely mentioned 
and affecting price only erratically. 
Questions of price apart, in the new, 
two-tiered wild rice market, there is 
the further question, the most fun- 
damental of all, Is paddy rice as good 
as lake rice? 
Naturally, the paddy growers’ stock 
response is, “They’re genetically the 
same. There’s no difference.” This 
hUUJ. 
