CODORA, Calif.—After facing four years of drought and state-imposed water restrictions, Bruce and Christopher Lopes struggled to save their organic rice farm in northern California’s Sacramento Valley.
The father-and-son duo set out on a mission to reinvent their operations by using new methods to farm rice, as well as mill and sell their own rice for the first time in the farm’s more than century-old history.
They are among the few organic rice farmers in North America trying the Japanese integrated duck–rice farming method to control weeds, conserve water and fertilize their rice fields without using synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, chemical pesticides, and herbicides….