Sacramento Valley Rice

The Mechoopda Indian Tribe of Chico Rancheria describes a valley where waterfowl and salmon came “in staggering numbers.” Salmon was dried, sometimes pounded into a fine powder, bone and all, to keep. Acorns were the staple, and in season the Mechoopda harvested grass seeds, greens and bulbs, with baskets made for gathering and winnowing the seeds. The Tribe’s page tells of the souls of the dead traveling to a cave in the Sutter Buttes.

After gold was found in 1848, the Tribe writes, its people “often met with violence in efforts to hunt and gather in accustomed places,” and mining silt “damaged crucial salmon runs.” Mooretown Rancheria’s history records the removal of September 4, 1863: 461 Concow Maidu left Chico, and 277 survived the two weeks to Round Valley. Mooretown’s federal recognition, ended in 1961, was restored in 1983.

The Sacramento’s floods spilled into low basins on both sides of the river. In 1880 the Colusa County history described a strip of tule west of the river about six miles wide and eighteen long, and called the basins “immense reservoirs for the reception of the floods.” The round tule grew up to fifteen feet high.

Hydraulic mining sent gravel and sand down the Yuba and Feather, filling the Feather’s channel fifteen feet or more. On January 7, 1884, Judge Lorenzo Sawyer declared the debris a public and private nuisance. Weirs were built to let floodwater out of the river into the basins and bypasses: the Sacramento Weir in 1916, the Fremont Weir at the head of the Yolo Bypass in 1924, then the Moulton, Colusa and Tisdale weirs in 1932 and 1933. The Yolo Bypass now carries 80 percent of the system’s floodwater. Rice was planted chiefly on land that had grown wheat and barley.

Keisaburo Koda came from Fukushima in 1908 and in the late 1910s leased rice land near Knights Landing. California’s 1913 Alien Land Law barred him from owning land, so when he moved south in the 1920s he formed a company with his American-born children as stockholders. Japanese Americans called him the Rice King. A Japanese grower brought the Onsen variety from Japan in 1918. Nand Singh Johl, one of the first Punjabi settlers in the Yuba City area, arrived in 1906 and helped bring rice growing to the northern valley.

The station at Biggs also bred new varieties. Calrose, a medium grain, was selected there from a cross of Caloro and Calady; its seed was increased in 1947 and went to a few growers for trial in 1948. By 1949 the valley grew 290,000 acres, seeded mostly from airplanes.

Albert and Frances Lundberg left Nebraska in 1937, after the Dust Bowl, and settled at Richvale with their four sons. In 1969 the family grew its first organic crop, 76 acres of brown rice, and in 1973 Homer Lundberg and 53 other local farmers founded California Certified Organic Farmers.

In the 2022 drought growers planted 254,000 acres, the fewest since 1958; in 2025 they planted 533,000, the most since 2016. Most of it is medium grain, harvested in September and October.

Lundberg Family Farms is still in Richvale. Massa Organics started as a small organic rice farm in Hamilton City in 2002, and the Polit family began growing organic rice near Maxwell in 1983 before adding Organic Roots olive oil.

Michael Bosworth grew conventional rice for years with his family at Rue & Forsman Ranch and now grows jasmine and basmati on his own farm in East Nicolaus, just north of Sacramento. A fifth-generation farmer, he founded Next Generation Foods in 2006 to sell his rice. The company plants its own seed for each crop, never blends varieties when it mills, and keeps the milled rice in cold storage. Mulvaney’s B&L serves it as Bosworth rice.

Two festivals celebrate the birds: the Snow Goose Festival in Chico, January 28–31, 2027, and California Duck Days in Davis on April 24, 2027.