Building the Sustainability of Wild Rice as a Food Source

For the Anishnaabe, wild rice holds important cultural significance: it’s a gift from the creator that’s alive and interwoven with their identity, journey and relationship to the land. As such, its highly respected and features in a variety of dishes, medicines, and ceremonies.

Around 50% of the wild rice consumed in Canada, however, is not wild and is imported from the United States, where it’s grown in flooded paddies and considered cultivated wild rice. Moreover, though flooded paddies have been successful in meeting the high commercial demand for wild rice, they also pack a serious environmental punch in terms of greenhouse gas emissions—even a reduction of 10% on emissions in the rice industry would be equivalent to removing 10 million vehicles from the road.

There are also questions around whether harvesting fish waste could be a useful way of fertilizing wild rice as it is growing.

To tackle all of these questions, researchers at IISD-ELA (in collaboration with the Myera Group, Lakehead University and several Treaty #3 Indigenous communities) are studying the impact of fish waste on water quality, wild rice paddies, and neighbouring ecosystems, as well as investigating the possibility of reducing water usage in cultivated wild rice.

Working out of 15 tubs, scientists are experimenting with two different kinds of wild rice. The plants are grown at varying depths of 30 cm, 20 cm, 15 cm, 10 cm, and 5 cm. Additionally, they’re trying out different levels of saturation, some tubs are fully saturated while others are wetted every other day. The goal is to find the sweet spot where the wild rice plants will happily grow at a certain reduced water depth.

The Myera Group, an Indigenous-led company in Manitoba, is the industrial sponsor for this work. They are leading several initiatives focused on food sovereignty added value products from wild rice.