From seeding to store shelves, rice takes high-tech route

NEW MADRID, Mo. -- So you thought brown and white rice were different varieties? There's not a kernel of truth to it.

White rice is simply brown rice stripped of its branny outer coating, the result of the surprisingly high-tech processing that transforms unclean, "rough" rice to the cookable white grain on store shelves.

As rice growing has become a precise science, so has the finishing at such places as the Louis Dreyfus Corp. mill near this Bootheel community, where the processing makes use of virtually everything, broken kernels and all.

The around-the-clock processing goes something like this:

Rice is ushered through a series of automated sorting machines, separating the kernels from their inedible hulls or husks and any debris from the harvesting or storing, including grasshoppers, frogs, combine parts or dirt clogs.

"Farmers don't have the cleaners we have," Steve Gillespie, the Louis Dreyfus mill's operations manager, said while guiding a reporter through the plant.

The rough rice then passes through "sheller" machines that remove the hull, leaving brown rice with bran layers still surrounding the kernel. Most of the hulls are shipped off to poultry houses for use as bedding, with smaller percentages used in cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.

Brown rice then is milled by machines that rub the grains together under pressure, removing the bran layer and revealing the white or "polished" rice. The bran is used in cereals, mixes and vitamin concentrates, with non-food grades used as livestock feed.

Milled white rice, at its best, is made up of clean, polished whole kernels that have nutritional "enrichment" added during the process.

During processing, rice streams through sorters with a laser scanner that searches out discolored or broken kernels. When spotted, the bad kernels are blasted aside with pressurized air, leaving just whole kernels to continue the journey.