Rice: Overview: Rice Cultivation

The earliest record of rice cultivation in the English colonies is from Virginia in 1647; from the beginning, rice was thought of as an export crop. By the late seventeenth century, as rice production increased in South Carolina, Virginia plantation owners found it more profitable to grow tobacco. Asian rice (O. sativa indica) was probably first introduced to South Carolina from Madagascar in the 1680s. The English herbalist William Solomon, who had lived in South Carolina from 1687 and 1690, saw rice “flourish” there, and, he claimed in his Botanologia (1710), it was “the best rice which grows on the whole Earth.”