A great story of how one problem’s solution led to benefits for all.
Rice farmers' field of opportunity
Flooded acres recycle waste, provide habitat
By Jim Downing - Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:00 am PST Sunday, January 14, 2007
Fifteen years ago, Sutter County rice farmer Mike DeWitt began to till and flood his fields after the fall harvest, instead of burning them.
Nine years ago, DeWitt realized this change -- a response to clean-air legislation -- offered a business opportunity, too.
"We saw all the birds on the water and we figured, 'Shoot, let's start a duck club!' " said DeWitt, a lifelong hunter.
Today, the 40-year-old DeWitt manages a low-key hunting operation: no clubhouse or post-hunt cocktails, just a dozen duck blinds nestled between fields on the 1,300 acres he farms with his father and brother.
He said he has no trouble selling 21 annual memberships at $1,500 apiece for the three-month duck season, which ends Jan. 28. The revenue doesn't cover the $45 an acre it costs him to plow the rice straw under and flood the field, a process that's necessary to speed the straw's decomposition. But it's a welcome cash flow in a difficult business, and it comes during a season that would otherwise be devoted to catching up on equipment repairs and paperwork.
These new hunting clubs -- which have sprouted, in one form or another, on perhaps half of the Valley's 2,500 rice farms -- are evidence of the dramatic change in the region's wintertime landscape that followed the Legislature's 1991 restriction on rice straw burning.
For years before that, the rice industry was an environmental pariah: Smoke from burning fields darkened Sacramento skies in the fall, and a planting boom in the 1970s and '80s was blamed for gobbling up wildlife habitat.
Now, the good will created by flooding the fields and creating bird habitat -- even if some of it is used for hunting -- has helped change the prickly relationship rice farmers and environmentalists once had.
