Michael Schläppi, a molecular biologist at Marquette University, “is experimenting with growing rice in the Midwest,” says the NPR blog The Salt. Schläppi began work four years ago and slogged through 200 varieties to winnow down to a promising few. The most promising of all is a Russian strain called Krasnodarsky 3352. The challenge in the upper Midwest is finding a rice strain that will sprout, flower, mature and ripen into grain before a killing frost in the fall. Ordinarily rice is grown in regions with long, warm growing season; in the United States, the major rice-growing states are California, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Missouri. Rice plants take from three to six months to grow from seeds to harvest.
At a test plot 30 miles north of the Marquette campus, Schläppi says his experimental rice has flowered and rice grains are forming. “He hasn’t harvested the crop yet, but Schläppi is already plotting to expand his experiment to a full acre,” says NPR. He says the Russian variety is “almost made for Wisconsin,” and could produce yields that exceed the U.S. average.