The first known time that rice was planted in Australia was in 1906. It was planted in the south-eastern part of Australia and was planted by Jo Takasuka. Jo Takasuka was an import/export merchant who was previously in the Japanese parliament.in the same year of the plantation of rice he sowed a total 35 acres of rice on flood-prone land that he rented from a farmer named Nyah. This flood-prone land was on the Murray River. Rice first came to Australia in 1850’s but no one tried to produce the rice until 1906. He struggled with many failed attempts of rice cultivation and lack of finances so he ended the enterprise in 1927.
During the time of Jo Takasuka’s failed enterprise, farmers around Leeton and Griffith in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation started to commercially grow rice using seeds from California. In 1924 the first successful commercial crop was produced.
The start of growing rice was economic, Jo Takasuka only started growing rice because he wanted to become wealthy and earn a lot of money. But now it is a political choice because we want rice to grow in our own country and the government is trying to get farmers to start growing rice.
Most of our rice plantations are around the Murrumbidgee Valley in NSW and in the Murray Valley in Victoria. Suitable types of soil for rice growing are in the Ord River Irrigation Area (ORIA) in Western Australia’s East Kimberley, because it has a nice warm climate and easy access to water irrigation. But in many other places this isn’t the case because Australia is one of the driest continents in the world and it is hard for us to get easy water irrigation and suitable soil types for rice growing because our land is so dry. Although there is a lot of water, they don’t have the right climate for growing rice because it isn’t humid. Rice likes to grow and grows better in humid weather, that’s why they grow it in Asian countries because a lot of them are quite humid.
Most of the water irrigation comes from the Murray River and the Murrumbidgee Valley as they are both major rivers and they hold lots of water although rice plantations are only allowed a certain amount of water because rice uses a lot of water to grow as it is grown in paddies, paddies are man-made ponds that originated from China.
By them growing in paddies it uses a lot of water, this can give consequences to other farmers because the government can completely cut off all off their water irrigation and sources and they cannot receive water for their farming business, then they could possibly go out of business.
On that note I believe that rice farming and plantations should be discontinued to do the farmers using water form far more important things. Asia grows lots and lots of rice and we can easily get it import to Australia. I think we could grow rice in our more humid parts of Australia like Queensland, it gets a lot of rainfall and it is a humid part of Australia which is great for rice to grow in like I said before. If that happens and they government shares out the water irrigation out evenly to all of the farming companies I think it could work out well.