Cats Forever
Interesting question.
I am not familiar with the rice in CA before the 1970's but I doubt it if a Holt was ever considered for rice. The reason is that I believe that rice was cut by binders and the bundles shocked allowing the grain to dry before threshing well into the 1930's. Then it went to the thresher. Rice was tough to harvest compared to wheat. The next version was to windrow the rice and run it through a combine but I think it was well beyond Holt's day. Just my 2 cents and nothing factual to back it up.
We had a couple neighbors that would go down to Califoria to harvest rice after they were done with harvest here. The guy I knew said they used a 36 and pulled it with a Sixty Caterpillar. The 36 was on skids so it would slide over the mud. They used a sixty because they would go through more mud I’m told. This would have been in the late fifties.
BP.