One day, someone - someone like you, maybe, someone with the Hacker Nature - was looking at the rice they'd bought and thought "You know what, it just *cannot* be all that difficult to just grow this stuff here, it costs a fortune to import. How hard can it possibly be?"

So they set to digging irrigation trenches, and had a go at it, and maybe a couple of shitty harvests later they'd got the trick nailed.

And here we are.