Meet the California Farm Growing Organic Rice With Ducks

Inside Lopes Family Farms, where a century-old California farming family is rethinking how rice can be grown.

There are some things we bring home because they're good. And then there are the things that make us call each other and say, you need to see how they grow this.

The rice from Lopes Family Farms was the second kind.

In Princeton, California, Bruce and Christopher Lopes are growing certified-organic rice on land their family has farmed for generations. Walk into one of their rice fields during growing season, though, and you'll find something you probably aren't expecting: hundreds of ducks.

And they're not just hanging out there. They're working.

A California rice farm since 1911

Lopes Family Farms comes from more than a century of California agriculture. The family has been farming since 1911, and today the farm is run by father-and-son team Bruce and Christopher Lopes on more than 200 acres dedicated to certified-organic rice.

Keeping a family farm alive for more than a century also means being willing to change the way things have always been done. For the Lopes family, that eventually meant looking halfway around the world for another way to grow rice.

Why are there ducks in the rice?

The method is known as integrated rice-and-duck farming. Its roots reach back centuries in China, with a modern version developed in Japan known as Aigamo farming. Rather than treating the rice plant, weeds, insects, soil and animals as completely separate problems to manage, the system puts them to work together.

The idea is wonderfully simple. Ducklings move through the flooded rice paddies eating weeds and insects that would otherwise compete with or damage the rice. As they move through the field, they also return nitrogen and organic matter to the soil. Meanwhile, the growing rice provides the ducks with food and shelter.

One field. Two living systems helping each other along.

It's the kind of farming that sounds novel until you realize much of it is actually very old.

Growing organic rice with less water

Water matters enormously when you're growing rice in California. One of the reasons Christopher Lopes became interested in duck-rice farming was the possibility of growing organic rice without relying on the deeper flooding traditionally used to help suppress weeds.

According to Lopes Family Farms, integrating ducks into their rice fields has allowed the farm to reduce the water required on its duck-rice acreage by as much as two-thirds. The ducks take over part of the work the water once had to do: eating weeds, foraging for insects, fertilizing as they go and becoming part of the farming system itself.

It isn't farming with nature as a pretty backdrop. Nature is doing some of the farming.

From seedling to California Calrose rice

Before those green fields become bags of rice, the process starts with tiny seedlings. Lopes uses rice trays and transplanting equipment as part of the duck-rice system, establishing young rice plants before the ducks enter the fields.

Over the growing season, those flooded paddies turn deep green and eventually gold as harvest approaches. Among the rice grown by Lopes Family Farms is organic California Calrose, the medium-grain rice California is known for.

Calrose cooks up tender and slightly sticky while still keeping its shape, which makes it one of those wonderfully useful pantry staples: rice bowls, soups, sides, stuffed vegetables, fried rice, or simply a warm bowl with a little butter or olive oil and salt.

Simple food tends to leave nowhere for the ingredient to hide, which is exactly why the ingredient matters.

Why Market Mama wanted this rice

We talk a lot about knowing your farmer. This is what we mean.

Not every ingredient needs a complicated wellness story attached to it. Sometimes we just want to know that the food in our kitchen came from people paying attention to the land, thinking carefully about how they grow, and producing something genuinely good.

A bag of rice can look pretty ordinary sitting in a pantry. Behind this one are four generations of a California farming family, hundreds of ducklings waddling through green paddies, a farming method with centuries of history, and a father and son trying to leave their piece of land better equipped for the generation after them.

That feels worth knowing. And worth bringing home.

Lopes Family Farms organic California rice is now available through Market Mama for local delivery in Los Angeles.

Welcome to the market, little ducks. 🦆🌾