Spain is one of the great rice producers in Europe. The annual production of this cereal is around 800,000 tons, a significant portion of the 2.8 million tons produced in the European Union. Now a new country could be incorporated into the list of European producing countries (although it comes late to join the Union list).
It is the United Kingdom.
A crop making their way. The rice cultivation makes its way to England. An experimental rice plantation is demonstrating the viability of the cultivation of this cereal in the relatively fresh and humid climate of the British islands.
Nine varieties. The experiment is being conducted by the UKCEH (UK Center for Ecology and Hydrology) and a marriage of local farmers, Craig and Sarah Taylor. The experimental rice cultivation occupies four plots of a land in the FENS region, in Cambridgeshire.
In this region of the East English, marshes and peat areas predominate. The soil in this region is not only rich in nutrients and conducive to agriculture but also offers, thanks to peat, the possibility of creating floodplains such as those required by rice cultivation.
The four plots occupied by this experimental crop have been sufficient to cultivate nine varieties of rice, including rice originating in Brazil, Italy or the Philippines, varieties used for plates such as risotto, Basmati rice or sushi.
With the help of heat. Cultivating rice in the British climate does not seem like a great idea, but the results seem to indicate otherwise. It may have contributed the exceptionally warm summer that has affected the British islands. The future of rice cultivation on the islands could depend on the heat lived this year being a simple anomaly or fruit of a trend marked towards increasing temperatures.
“We could never have contemplated that this grew here,” he explained to the BBC Sarah Taylor, one of those responsible for this project. “Not in a million years,” Apostille Craig, her husband.
Tying the carbon. The mob plays an important role in carbon regulation. This soil originates in the decomposition of organic matter and stores a large amount of carbon. The degradation of these soils as a result of agricultural use implies the emission to the atmosphere of huge amounts of carbon dioxide.
The rice sowing project wants to avoid this, binding the carbon to the terrestrial peat of the English region. This implies that the project not only has the potential to help adapt to change in the weather, it is also a way to mitigate the emissions that cause it.
New competition? Climate change involves numerous challenges and perhaps one of the greatest has to do with agriculture. Changes in temperature and rain patterns imply that the crops that once prospered in one place stop doing so. On the other hand, change also open the road to the introduction of new crops where they would have been inconceivable before.
In a changing context, rice crops in Spain raise a double threat. On the one hand, the drought lived a few years ago was a threat to endanger the supply of water in areas such as the Ebro Delta. As if that were not enough, the rainy episodes that we have seen in the last year have also brought new threats to the cereal producing regions.
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Image | UKCEH
