Farmers in the Northeast are pivoting to a warm-weather staple to adapt to a changing climate.
There was a persistent puddle of water in the corner of Gail Wittwer-Laird’s field in Upstate New York. A family of beavers had moved downstream, so over the years, as the rains grew stronger, the puddle grew bigger. “When it floods, you can’t get the equipment in there to mow” or grow any crops, said Wittwer-Laird. So rather than try to change what was happening in the field, she decided that she would work with the elements. Wracking her brain thinking about what to grow in a wet field, Wittwer-Laird thought of rice — a crop typically associated with warmer, more humid climates.
To her surprise, Wittwer-Laird’s Googling led her to a small but bustling community of rice farms and research in Upstate New York. Excited, she jumped in her car and drove about four hours up to Cornell University, where the university’s extension program had an experimental rice research project. “I went to them and said, show me your paddy,” said Wittwer-Laird. She returned to her own farm with several packets of seeds, set to start a paddy of her own.
Wittwer-Laird began her rice foray three summers ago, around the same year that flash floods devastated farms in much of the northeastern United States. Her story of flooded fields is one of many that Jenny Kao-Kniffen, one of the lead researchers at Cornell University’s rice project, heard from farmers in the region; that’s what inspired her team to focus on how rice can aid climate resiliency. Around the state and beyond, weather hac shifted to become more extreme, bringing intense rainfall and hailstorms that could damage crops. “I saw [the crop losses], I thought, we gotta do something,” Kao-Kniffen said.
Rice, it seemed, was a crop that could support this adaptation. It was flood-resistant, amenable to swinging conditions, and could sell at a relatively high price. So Kao-Kniffen, along with other researchers and pioneering farmers in the region, are working to make it a more common crop in the Northeast, as a buffer for farmers to adapt to increasingly unpredictable weather.
Rice in Upstate New York may be surprising for many, as it is thought to be incompatible with chillier locales. But the plant is not a novel solution. In North America, prior to colonization, Indigenous tribes like Ojibwe, Menominee, and Oneida harvested wild rice over much of the Northeast. But when Europeans dominated the area, rice largely disappeared, where the agriculture in the region switched to corn, soy, and other crops. “Once the system locked in, they continued with that,” said Chuan Liao, another lead researcher on the rice project.
The Northeast’s rice farming in a modern context didn’t start until the 1970s and 80s. During this time, a few farmers in states like Vermont, Maine, and New York began a renewed interest in rice, namely Oryza sativa, where they grew the plant by adopting Asian techniques from northern China and Japan. Both areas are similarly dominated by temperate temperatures and mountainous landscapes, Liao explained, so techniques from across the world would be a fit for this part of North America.
Early efforts were motivated primarily by the desire for sustainable agriculture, an interest in cultural traditions, and the pure joy of trying out rice farming.
In parallel, researchers at Cornell also built partnerships with these pioneering farmers. They collected seeds from other parts of the globe, such as northern China, Japan, and Italy, to find and develop cultivars that would grow best with cooler climes and clay-rich soils of the northern Appalachians. These early efforts were motivated primarily by the desire for sustainable agriculture, an interest in cultural traditions, and the pure joy of trying out rice farming.
In recent years, however, climate change has become an important part of the rice conversation. “Back when [Cornell’s program] started, there wasn’t this intense flooding that was happening,” Kao-Kniffen said. “Climate has changed and you can just see it every year. And so we thought this was a good opportunity for farmers to learn some kind of agricultural system that works with the changing climate.” This spurred the university’s most recent rice research efforts: to build capacity and encourage more farmers to take on rice growing and increase the Northeast’s agricultural climate resiliency.
Beginning in 2023, Kao-Kniffen and her colleagues started this climate focus, looking for rice cultivars in the university’s repository that would fare well in extreme weather variations. They looked in the project’s past data, searching for rice that could withstand intense flooding as well as droughts. For instance, upland rice seemed to prefer drier conditions, whereas arborio rice thrived in shallow floods. The team then started testing out their selected cultivars in paddies on the campus, and on fields of local farmers that were interested in growing the crop.
Wittwer-Laird was one of those farmers. In her first year, she purchased seeds from a number of different sources, just to see what would work on her land. She then prepped her field for rice — excavating 18 inches of soil, digging a channel, installing a pump, and planting five varieties.
It takes around 120 days for rice to grow from seed to maturation, Wittwer-Laird said, which just fits inside the short growing window in Upstate New York. The season starts in April, when soaked grains turn into sprouts and get planted into trays in the greenhouse. By May, each seedling is then transplanted into the flooded field by hand. The rice Wittwer-Laird grows, mainly arborio, thrives in the flooded areas, she said. They’ll grow throughout the summer and get harvested in the fall. This year, she plans to sell her harvest to chefs in high-end restaurants in her area.
“It’s a completely different type of crop than I’ve ever experienced. There’s a certain magic to it.”
Liao hopes rice can be a complement for more farmers, since the crop can benefit northeastern agriculture in three dimensions: economically, socially, and environmentally, which he details in a 2025 PNAS paper. “It’s a sort of alternative agriculture that’s profitable,” he said. “And [rice fields] can help with flood control.” He notes that there are two ways that farmers have supplemented their businesses with rice in this region: Farmers either sell their yields at higher prices to local high-end restaurants and farmer’s markets, or they scale up to market their products to grocery stores.
But scaling up these efforts will take time. Notably, rice farming in the Northeast lacks expertise and equipment. Most of the existing rice farming in the United States, namely the Mississippi Delta, uses “giant machines” to plant and harvest larger fields, Liao explained. But that approach doesn’t work with small-scale properties in Upstate New York. So to help farmers grow rice in this corner of the country, Liao and his colleagues have held field days and created how-to guides, in partnership with farmers that have grown rice here for decades, all to disseminate skills to grow the regional movement. The researchers are also currently working to import rice-farming equipment from Japan, since machinery from East Asia is more compatible with the landscape in this corner of the country. The shipment of equipment just arrived on the East Coast this spring.
“We will be serving about a dozen farmers through our community sharing model,” Liao said, where multiple farmers can share and use the Japanese equipment; the details of the community sharing model are still being solidified.
Lionel Kim, another farmer in New York’s Columbia County, is looking forward to this community approach. Kim became interested in rice farming around three years ago, after seeing paddies in farms in their area. They now help out with rice growing for two small farms in the region. “I’m really excited as far as connecting with different people, continuing to learn together, and understanding the potentials for cooperative rice growing,” said Kim.
Rice is a special crop, as both researchers and farmers note, with generations of culture tied to it. It’s a crop that needs minimal attention and weeding, will flourish at its own pace, all while being a profitable crop that can support local farming. “I think that rice is definitely a very positive kind of endeavor for that reason,” Kim noted.
The beauty of rice, too, also becomes apparent in the fall. Rice stalks start to take on a golden hue as bright green seedlings mature, signaling that their seeds are ready to harvest. “It was a completely different type of crop than I’ve ever experienced,” Wittwer-Laird said. “There’s a certain magic to it.”
