Something else that’s been noted about wheat farming which would also apply to rice farming - wheat is a visible crop with a defined harvest date, and thus is quite amenable to taxation and state formation, whereas, say, potato farming is harder to make legible to the state.
I wonder if similar studies have been done on farmers’ attitudes towards the validity of authority.
There's a fantastic paper on this topic, "The Origin of the State: Land Productivity or Appropriability?" [1]
Grain has a predictable harvest time, long storage time, easy to transport dry, etc. This makes it an ideal target for bandits and rouge states alike. Tubers are heavy, harvestable year-round, can be grown in small patches, and parish easily. Who wants to steal 100lbs of potatoes when you can steal 50lbs of rice? Tubers don't require complex hierarchy to defend your stores.
Growing grain is apparently a devil's bargain between fending off bandits and fending off the tax man who promises defense against bandits.
It does not look like the article you linked to mentions that, but the easiest thing to steal is livestock. Cattle and horses move on their own feet, you don't need to carry them. A few raiders can come back from a raid with a few thousands pounds worth of meat, and very little effort. Getting the same amount of calories in grains is many times more difficult and riskier.
I think storable food predates agriculture. Nuts keep quite well for very extended periods of time. Smoking and drying fish appears to also have been known for many thousands of years.
The problem with raiding before the domestication of the horse is that it's a lot of risk for not a lot of reward. How much can you carry on your back? Maybe you can carry more on some sort of wheel-barrow, but the wheel was invented after the domestication of the horse (for quite obvious reasons).
Still, while the horse is thought to have been domesticated around 3500 BC, there were fortified settlements before 4000 BC, a sign that raiding or even warfare was common. Sheep and goats were domesticated already at the time, and cheese was known. Maybe raiders were trying to steal cheese? Otherwise, there were luxury items, or status items, like polished maces, glazed and painted pottery, adornments made of animal teeth, and early artifacts made from copper. But I'm not sure it ever made sense to risk your life and raid a village just to run away with a bag of wheat.
When wheat is taxed it's usually done by centralizing the milling. Once water and windmills were invented, they became communal resources and starting with the middle ages that’s where taxation was calculated. Keeping track of everyone’s wheat fields was never practical, especially since yield is an independent variable.
I wonder if similar studies have been done on farmers’ attitudes towards the validity of authority.