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Thoughts on Rice
This podcast is for growers, PCAs, consultants, and other industry professionals in the California rice industry. We'll primarily be focusing on the Sacramento Valley and Delta Region of California. The UCCE Rice Farm Advisors aim to deliver extension information relating to the California rice industry.
Find out more about UCCE and California rice here!
Thoughts on Rice
Rice Seed Certification Program with Timothy Blank
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Together, the UCCE Rice Farm Advisors seek to provide relevant, topical research-backed information relating to CA rice production.
Timothy Blank (Director of Seed Certification Operations, the Foundation Seed Program Executive Director, and the Certified Seed Program Advisor for the California Crop Improvement Association) and Sarah Marsh sit down to talk about the role and history of rice seed certification in California.
California Crop Improvement Association Resources
CCIA Website
Certified Seed Sampler Training
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Hello and welcome to Thoughts on Rice, a podcast hosted by the University of California Cooperative Extension Rice Advisors. I'm one of your hosts, Sarah Marsh, and I'm a Rice Farm Advisor for Colusa and Yolo Counties.
SPEAKER_02I'm Whitney from the Forest. I'm the Cooperative Extension Rice Advisor for Sutter, Yuba, Placer, and Sacramento Counties.
SPEAKER_01My name is Luis Espino. I'm the Rice Farming Systems Advisor for Butte and Glen Counties. I'm Michelle
SPEAKER_03Leinfelder-Miles. I'm a farm advisor in the Delta region. I work on all sorts of field crops, grains and forages, but one of those is rice. And the counties that I cover are San Joaquin, Sacramento, Yolo-Solano, and Contra Costa counties.
SPEAKER_04Together, the UCCE Rice Farm Advisors seek to provide relevant, topical, research-backed information relating to California rice production. Today, we're fortunate enough to have Timothy Blank here to speak with us. Now, Timothy wears many hats. He's the Director of Seed Certification Operations, the Foundation Seed Program Executive Director, and the Certified Seed Program Advisor for the California Crop Improvement Association. Now, it's that last hat that we're going to talk about today, the role of seed certification in California rice. So, Timothy, thanks for coming on the podcast.
SPEAKER_00Thank you.
SPEAKER_04Can I ask, what led you to this role specifically? Is there something in your background or interests that led you to becoming a part of this organization?
SPEAKER_00Yes. Well, I went to UC Davis as an undergraduate and my focus at education was the College of Ag and Environmental Sciences. So when I graduated right out of college, I saw this opening at the California Crop Improvement Association. It looked very intriguing. And so I was hired at that time and actually 2024 rice season marked It's the 20th year that I've been inspecting rice seed production fields for the California Crop Improvement Association.
SPEAKER_04Congratulations. I had no idea. What a wonderful anniversary to have.
SPEAKER_00Thank you.
SPEAKER_04So with the California Crop Improvement Association, can you describe a bit about the role that this organization has in the seed industry, specifically relating to rice seed?
SPEAKER_00So the California Crop Improvement has several different functions. Its primary function is seed certification, and it provides provides that service to all different seed production crops, mainly agronomic crops in California. And the biggest ones that people are familiar with are sunflowers, rice, alfalfa, and small grains. For rice, of the rice that's planted in California, 100% of it comes through our seed program. So it's a success story in the seed certification program in California. We have other functions as well. We do research funding for certain UC researchers. We host isolation maps and we have a program for the native seed industry as well.
SPEAKER_04Well, that's a great overview. And now with that, and it's our background, let's dive in a little bit and talk about in broad terms what seed certification is and then what that might look like in rice. In
SPEAKER_00a nutshell, seed certification is a pedigree system for seed that has a limited number of generations from beginning to end. It has a terminus. And there's third-party oversight at each step in the process. And those generations are breeder, foundation, registered, and certified. The purpose of having all of this pedigree system is twofold. One is to maintain the integrity and purity of the variety. And then the second one, for the growers especially, is to have quality seed in terms of physical purity, freedom from weeds, diseases, and having high germination. So that's what it is. Big picture, but that's maybe treating it in a vacuum of how it came to be. I'd like to mention where it came from, because 125 years ago, seed certification did not exist in the United States and the world. And in rice in particular, in California, our first commercial crop was in 1912. And there was no even thought of seed certification in California until about 1925. And in reality, the first certified crop in California was about 1940. So from 1912 to 1940, that's over 25 years of the rice industry growing and developing, but outside of a formal seed structure. And so we had problems that developed in that time period. And when we take that back to all crops in the United States and around the world, that was happening as well. There were issues as plant breeding practices started becoming adopted, varieties were being developed, especially in the latter part of the 1800s when the land-grant universities were formed and public and private breeding programs were being started. Breeders were releasing varieties and within a few generations they would lose their identity. They'd be full of contaminations of other mixtures of other crops. There would be noxious weeds and common weeds difficult to separate. And so this was happening in the latter part of the 1800s, early part of the 1900s. And so seed certification programs in the United States started to be developed to address that and provide a structure for the seed industry. So that's the background of where it all came from.
SPEAKER_04Wow, it sounds really interesting just to, I guess, track the progress of this, the aim, the mission of this overall reaching organization, starting back to when rice and other crops first started becoming developed in California. And it seems like a really vital part of not only the seed industry, but agriculture as a whole.
SPEAKER_00Yes, definitely. It's especially important in the agronomic crops because with vegetable crops, you're going to have seed production at a very small scale. You might have a half acre, an acre of seed production that's under really close scrutiny by the company that's maintaining that variety. With crops like wheat or rice, you may have thousands of acres of one particular variety. And I'm just talking about seed production. And that's a lot of ground to cover for a company. And so where our agencies throughout the United States and in California, where we come in as we inspect all those fields, and we're an extra set of eyes for the seed industry, for those crops where there's a very large amount of seed production.
SPEAKER_04What are some of the standards that seed rice is held to that you're keeping keeping an eye on when you're going into these fields?
SPEAKER_00One of the first things we do when we're training inspectors is I show them what red rice looks like. It's not something that comes automatically. It's easily mistaken for water grass, for example. And so we go to known fields and we check. I say, this is red rice. These are all the characteristics. And I have them be able to identify it from 100 yards away. And so those are the kind of things, other varieties, problematic weeds. There's lots of weeds that are not really... not that significant for seed production because the seeds are so small, but other weeds, they are problematic, like late water grass. So if there's heavy levels of late water grass in a field, we would treat that differently than sprangletop. When you have overflight contaminations in rice production, since most of the rice is planted by air, we have standards for separation. It's not technically isolation standards because it's a self-pollinating crop, but we have... separation requirements because ideally with the red flags marking the certified fields the plains respect those boundaries and try to avoid passing over seed fields but it inevitably happens and so we have an automatic 100 foot separation that's on every field from one field to the neighboring field if it's another variety or if we don't know what variety it is and if we do see over fly contamination going in. Beyond that, we instruct the seed companies how much of that edge they should not harvest.
SPEAKER_04That's good to know. So the fields that are used for seed rice, what kind of eligibility criteria are there to become incorporated into this program?
SPEAKER_00So there is a one-year requirement that the previous year has to have been either fallow, another crop, or if it was in rice, it had to be the same variety and inspected by our organization. And since rice is generally in continuous production in rice, rice after rice after rice, the way that works out is we have, let's say you're going from M206 to M211. There would be one year transition where we would inspect that field going into M211, make sure there's not excessive number of volunteers, and then we pass that field. And then the following year, it's eligible to produce that new variety. So that's the eligibility requirement, one year.
SPEAKER_04There are also inspections, as I understand, of the grower's equipment to make sure there's not any kind of contamination there. Can you go into detail a little bit about that?
SPEAKER_00Certainly. There are inspections of equipment both at the planting side and at the harvesting side. The planting side, it's the grower signs an affidavit assuring us that he has done his due diligence and making sure that the planting equipment, trucks, trailers, etc., was cleaned out from seed of the previous planting. This includes aircraft. And in rice, it's especially with aircraft. So that is a self-inspection. And normally there's protocols in place where they know it's in seed production. And so they have agreements with the various handlers of the rice to do those inspections. On the tail end of the harvest, there are combine inspections. And we contract, when I say we, the California Crop Improvement Association contracts with the local ag commissioner's offices. And we have them inspect the combines. When they're going from one variety to another, if they're going from the same variety to the same variety, there's no inspection needed. But when they're changing varieties, the seed producer is obligated to call the Ag Commissioner's office, notify them shortly prior to harvest, and give them an opportunity to inspect the combine. That's a little more of an intensive process. If you've ever cleaned out a combine, you know it's a several-hour endeavor. There's lots of nooks and crannies and areas to open up and areas to vacuum and blow out. It can take upwards of eight hours and there can be 50 pounds of seed left over in there from the previous harvest. And so getting all that out is very important and we have the ag commissioners come with their flashlights and picks and they check to make sure that the hoppers and the headers are all cleaned out. that is at their discretion. They don't have to do that on all the seed producers. If they trust the seed producer and they have a good history, they may say, you do a self-inspection. If they are in that commissioner's office that likes to be more involved, they can do it more frequently. But there is a process for each step in the program. This also goes for when the rice is being cleaned at the seed conditioner there's also clean out procedures for the equipment there as well.
SPEAKER_04Can you explain a little bit about the isolation and time space requirement as well?
SPEAKER_00Certainly. So in some crops, there is isolation in time and space. In rice, there's just isolation in space. So for sunflowers, for example, you can stagger the plantings a month, month and a half apart so that they're blooming at different times. That's isolation in time. In rice, It's all planted relatively in the same block of time and maturing at around the same time. And so it's not really a thing. So there's just isolation in space. And that's the 100 foot separation when seed is planted parallel to the field. in upwards of a quarter mile separation when the neighboring field is planted perpendicular to the rice field. Now in practice, we don't know how the aircraft were flying, so we assume that they are planting parallel, but if we see evidence that they're going in perpendicular, we will walk into those fields as many feet as possible as needed to determine what level of contamination there is. And in a lot of cases, if it's a cow rose on cow rose field, we may not see a contamination. If it's M206 versus M210, they're the same market classes. It's not a really significant contamination in the big picture of things. But when you have a short grain versus a medium grain or a long grain versus a medium grain, it's really apparent. And that's where those inspections can really have an impact in terms of notifying the grower. You can't harvest the first 400 feet of that field because of an overflight contamination.
SPEAKER_04And in the case of that, I guess if you have some kind of mixture, unintentional mixture of long grain and short grain in a field and the grower is not able to harvest, say, 400 feet of that, what happens to that grain?
SPEAKER_00Well, fortunately, it's typically an amount of contamination that's significant for seed production, but not significant for the ultimate grain grade, USDA grain grade going for the growers. So he's just going to harvest that as a commercial crop and blend it in with the rest of his commercial crop.
SPEAKER_04And you did mention field inspections and we touched on the different classes earlier when we were talking, but can you tell me a bit about the different classes and the types of inspections or number of inspections that each of those classes require?
SPEAKER_00Yes, the foundation and registered class generations. Those have a higher level of standards in terms of off-types permitted. And we also have two inspections for those two classes of seed. And we try to time those two inspections at least one week apart so we can get different maturity stages for the rice because sometimes you can discern differences and varieties better at one stage than at and another. So we have two inspections for the foundation and registered and one inspection for the certified class.
SPEAKER_04Are there different types of allowable levels in each of those classes?
SPEAKER_00Yes. The foundation has the strictest standards at 1 in 50,000 frequency of OFF types. the registered is one in ten thousand and the certified is one in five thousand so there's a tenfold difference from the foundation to the certified class in terms of permittable level of off types and one in fifty thousand frankly is is a very strict standard compared to many of our other crops the rice industry really does not like off types they stand out a very a lot of them tend to stand out like a sore thumb out in the field what what that looks like for a general picture of what one in 50,000 looks like. If I'm walking through a field and I have a three foot pace and I have a six foot arm span, and so I'm walking, that's how many, think of the area I'm covering with that. If I walk 100 paces, that's 300 feet, and I find one plant, That's a different variety. In that 100 paces, and one plant would be two or three tillers, that's the maximum tolerance for the foundation class. In a certified class, it's about one plant in 10 paces. And if I need to fine tune it, because there's certainly different density levels within different fields, you may have some fields that are 75 heads per square foot and other fields that are 110 heads per square foot. And so that certainly factors in if your counts are getting close to the tolerance. So I carry a carpenter's square out there and I will take density and take the average of that and have my calculator on my computer that I plug and chug the numbers and it gives me the frequency of opt types.
SPEAKER_04So a pretty precise system then, I mean it would have to be to calculate that level of tolerance for the foundation, but pretty specific it seems like.
SPEAKER_00The best of our ability, yeah.
SPEAKER_04A little bit earlier you talked about weeds and diseases. Can you tell me a bit about the diseases that you're seeing sometimes when you're doing these field inspections and what kind of numbers would account for maybe a harvest restriction?
SPEAKER_00The seed-borne diseases that are of greatest concern for us are rice blast, bacani, and smut. Now our standards don't have any tolerances, maximum tolerances for these diseases. So we typically do not reject fields when these diseases are present. But because they are seed borne, we do note them in the field inspection report. So if the company wants to, maybe if they have extra seed fields, they might want to exclude a field that has a high or a significant level of rice blast. Or if there's hot spots in a certain area, We may recommend to them to avoid certain areas for seed production. The only time we reject seed fields for diseases is if they're quite severe. And we've done that on a few occasions. But fortunately, in California, disease pressure is one of the items of lesser concern compared to some of the other issues that we have. So there's weeds. Most of the weeds in rice are common weeds. By common weeds, I mean not noxious weeds. So the state has its list of noxious weeds. that are found in their regulations. And then they have, they break these noxious weeds down into two categories, those with a restricted seed grading and those with a prohibited seed grading. And those have different meanings to us as seed certifiers and has certain meanings to labelers. But for our conversation here, we have noxious weeds and we have common weeds. Most of the weeds in rice are common weeds. We're talking all the different water grass species, red stem, sprangle top. Most of the weeds people encounter are common weeds, which is good from a regulatory perspective. The ones that are problematic in rice of the common weeds are barnyard grass species. They kind of cloe us. And we have tolerances for how many seeds can be found per pound in a seedlot. They have a larger seed, so they're a little bit more difficult to clean out. That's why we tend to see more water grass compared to other species of weeds. But generally speaking, weeds can be cleaned out of a seedlot with enough handling. So the main problem for us when we're looking at a rice field is if it's so weedy that we can't do a decent inspection, we can't see into the field far enough to see if there's other problems in there, that's when there's too many weeds. And so we would say, hey, you can't harvest the first two checks on the west side because of excessive weeds and we're unable to do an adequate inspection. In terms of noxious weeds, there are a couple that are problematic, somewhat problematic. In Butte County, we have the winged water primrose, which has a pretty limited distribution. We have false pickerel weed, which is very, very restricted distribution. The noxious weed that most people are, that's most prevalent in rice fields is Johnson grass, but it's never, it's not an aquatic weed, but it's on the check borders. So it's not a problem. in the rice fields, but sometimes it gets caught up during harvest and occasionally it'll show up in a seed lot. And if it does, the seed lot has to be reclaimed. That's the protocol. If it shows up in the seed sample, it has to be reclaimed a whole lot. And then, of course, the weed that keeps me up at night from August through September is weedy red rice. And that's again, that's a common weed in California. And because it's a rise of sativa and weedy rice, if we want to go back to that earlier conversation about how rice eventually adopted seed certification in California, it showed up first in the 19 teens, right after the right first commercial production of rice in California. Within a few years, it was already a problem. And it became a big problem throughout the 1920s and the 1930s. And then right around World War II, 1945 is when rice really started to become adopting the rice seed certification program. And after adoption of certified seed, after World War II, red rice disappeared from the late 40s to the early 50s. It disappeared It disappeared in California, occasional occurrence here and there, but it was largely disappeared for several decades until it reemerged again in the early 2000s.
SPEAKER_04It's not great that weedy rice has reemerged, but I guess it's also a testament to how well the seed certification program worked for as long as it did to keep weedy rice from becoming so problematic for such a long time.
SPEAKER_00Yes, and we have zero tolerance for weedy rice. If we see one weedy rice plant in a field, it typically means there's more out there that we don't see. As good as my eyes are, I've been humbled enough times to know that there's things I don't see out there unless I'm standing on top of it sometimes. So we go to a lot of of effort to make sure that the certified fields are free of weedy rice and we have zero tolerance for it and that's not the case in all states. Some states it's such a problem they've just raised up their hands and have a low level tolerance.
SPEAKER_04So we've talked a little bit about harvest inspection measures in terms of partnering with the Ag Commissioner's offices to inspect the combines and making sure that there's a little contamination as possible. We also talked We talked a little bit about the conditioners and their inspection standards, but can we go back a little bit and talk about who can condition the rice once it's transferred from the field?
SPEAKER_00In California, there's about 20 rice seed conditioners. They sign up every year in our program. They sign an agreement that they agree to clean out their equipment when changing varieties, that they agree to keep records, to maintain the identity of the variety, maintain clean-out records, let us know the screen weights, the weight of the screenings, clean weights. that they're going to pull samples according to our protocols. They have an annual agreement that they sign, and then the Ag Commissioner also signs that. that agreement as well and normally designates an individual at that seeding conditioner to be the person responsible for any questions and for all things seed certification. And quite often that individual is also authorized to pull samples of rice as well.
SPEAKER_04So for sampling, can you explain a little bit about that as well and how that process goes?
SPEAKER_00Yes. So the goal of sampling is to pull a representative sample of that lot The bigger the lots, the seed lots, the more difficult that is, I wouldn't say difficult, but it becomes less and less representative when you have a one pound sample representing a one or two million pound lot. In the United States, we don't have maximum lot sizes. In Europe, they do. They would limit it to much smaller seed lots to address that concern. But we have representative sampling and in the Rice... system, seed system, it's a little bit different than most of the other crops in our program where if we're dealing with, let's say, alfalfa seed or bean seed, it's going to be bagged and tagged. And in rice, everything is bulk. So we're not pulling samples out of bags. We're pulling samples during the cleaning process. And there's different sampling techniques for each system. situation so with the rice situation you're going to have somebody coming out they'll they'll pull a sample in the stream of rice being cleaned out every at certain intervals they'll put it into a five gallon bucket and then know come out every 30 minutes or one hour and they'll have by the end of the the cleaning process 30 plus uh primary samples and they'll mix that mix it all together they'll out of that they'll pull out a sample that they're going to send to the seed lab. That lab then gets tested for purity, germination, noxious weeds, and a red rice rub out test for rice in particular.
SPEAKER_04Can you explain a bit about the red rice rub out?
SPEAKER_00Yes. Red rice rub out, is basically de-holing the rice so that we could see the brand color. Rice seed is planted with the hole on and when they're doing the purity and germination and noxious examination, the hole is on the seed. And so if there is a red rice contaminant, unless there's a difference in the hole color, which in most cases they're not, at least in the California types, most of the red rices in California have a straw hole similar to our standard varieties, you have to take the hole off to see if the kernel is red. And so we require that 500 grams of rice be de-hulled to a red rice rub out to ensure that none of those kernels are red.
SPEAKER_04And that's the responsibility of the seed inspector, the seed sampler?
SPEAKER_00They will send the sample. They'll send a thousand gram sample to the seed lab and they're going to list on their form which tests they're requesting the seed lab to do. And so the standard tests, purity, germination, noxious weeds. The analyst at the laboratory will take that thousand grams. They're going to pull 50 grams out of that. And they're going to check with a high degree of scrutiny every single bit of chaff in there, every other crop, every other weed seed, and they'll identify it by species. Then they're going to take 500 grams and they'll do the noxious examination. They'll quickly go through that 500 grams. Their eyes are only trying trained or set to focus on any noxious weeds. So if they see a Johnson grass seed, they'll pull that out. Everything else doesn't matter. And then we have that 500 grams for the red rice rub out.
SPEAKER_04So it sounds like getting a representative sample is incredibly important. And to do that, you need to have really highly trained seed samplers, right?
SPEAKER_00Yes. Yes. We have a program in California is unique. I think we're We're the only state, to my knowledge, of the state seed certification agencies that has a training program for seed samplers. So we require that each seed conditioner that's in our program that's actively cleaning seed have a representative from their company come and be trained by us in person once every three years and they pass a test and they are then the authorized person at that facility to pull the samples.
SPEAKER_04Is there any certified seed sampler trainings coming up for you guys?
SPEAKER_00In the Sacramento Valley every year we have a training in the second week of November so look at our website and that will, I think the exact date hasn't been announced yet, but should be soon.
SPEAKER_04And this podcast episode should be released in time for those listening to be into or interested in this to attend that Sac Valley training. So if this applies to you, I'd highly suggest that because it's a vital part of this whole process. Well, with that, Timothy, thank you so much for your time to talk about the seed certification program in California. If people have any questions, is there somewhere you'd like to direct them to go to?
SPEAKER_00They can go to our website, ccia.ucdavis.edu. It has our standards there. Has any meeting announcements or further trainings, go to our website.
SPEAKER_04Great. Thank you, Timothy.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_04Thank you. For more information about the UC Cooperative Extension RICE program, you can find all of these resources linked in our show notes. the UC Rice blog, the UC Agronomy Rice website, and our newsletters. Rice Briefs, which covers Colusa Yolo, Rice Notes, which covers Ure Sutter, Rice Leaf, which covers Butte and Glen, and Field Notes, which refers to rice in the Delta region of California. Stay tuned for our latest newsletter update, which should be released in early November.
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SPEAKER_04Thanks for listening to Thoughts on Rice, a University of California Cooperative Extension podcast from University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. You can find out more about this podcast on our website, thoughtsonrice.buzzsprout.com. We'd love to hear from you, whether it's from using our text link in the show notes, a survey submission in our feedback form, also in the show notes, or in a comment or rating on your podcast stream. Have a rice life. Mention of an agrochemical does not constitute a recommendation, merely the sharing of research findings. Always follow the label. The label is the law. Find out more at ipm.ucanr.edu. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent the views, thoughts, and opinions of the University of California. The material and information presented here The University of California name and all forms and abbreviations are the property of its owner, and its use does not imply endorsement of or opposition to any specific organization, product, or service.
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