Jim Whitaker

Now, you know, I was in Bangkok a few months ago and a farmer was on his back porch.

I'm like, well, how do you know if that's right?

He said, well, that's the way we've always done it.

I say I'm a fifth generation farmer.

He's probably a hundredth generation farmer.

I mean, they've probably been farming rice there for 2000 years in that same field.

It's just the way he's always done it.

So one of the first things we did on our rice fields was,

we adopted a technique that's a little different.

We leveled our fields completely flat.

This is called zero-grade.

Rice all over the world is grown in a flooded environment, and most people use the natural contour of the earth to cascade the water down and let the water flow downhill.

We call it continuous flood.

They continuously put water on their fields.

And we leveled ours flat with a perimeter road.

And what that perimeter road lets us do is capture rainfall.

So we're actually pumped less water.

We're actually able to use less water.

We have less runoff, less erosion, less nutrients leaving our field.

Nothing leaves our field unless we want it to.