Nature, Diligence Revive California Rice Industry : Agriculture: A negative image is shed. This week’s shipment to Japan symbolizes state growers’ success.

For five years, plant breeders in this rice bowl outpost have been developing a California version of koshi hikari, a variety of rice prized in Japan above all others.

Success is still a few years away, says agronomist Marlin Brandon, so there will not be any koshi hikari on board when a landmark cargo of California rice sets sail for Japan this week from the Port of Sacramento.

But the long-term targeting of the Japanese palate by scientists at the industry-funded Rice Experiment Station says much about the survival instincts of the state’s century-old rice-growing community.

The 136,363 bags of California rice being loaded aboard the M/V Koala represent a change of fortune for growers of a crop threatened by shrinking water supplies, environmentalist pressure and creeping urbanization. And that it is poised to breach Japan’s monumental barrier against imported rice makes it an apt symbol of the shifting Pacific Rim terrain spotlighted by the weekend Asia-Pacific summit in Seattle.

While Japan’s new generation of leaders bends to an emergency shortage of domestic rice and the demands of the world trading community, California rice growers and millers have emerged from their own battles on the home front in fine shape--in from the cold of political incorrectness to be held forth as a model of responsible agribusiness behavior.

The rice industry’s chief nemesis, influential water historian Marc Reisner, has retracted his indictment of California rice as a “monsoon crop in the desert” and is now aligned with growers in an ambitious scheme to reclaim several hundred thousand acres of wetlands drained by decades of dam-building.

The state’s 2,700 growers, most in a rice bowl of adobe soils between Sacramento and Chico, have also won praise from state and federal officials for cutting water use, slashing pesticide residues and backing passage of a state law that phases out the efficient but much-resented practice of burning rice straw after harvests.

“The rice industry has good guys and bad guys like anyone else, but these programs are very creative and very exciting,” said Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), a major voice on water and environmental issues. “The rice industry has improved by leaps and bounds. They’ve shown a greater willingness to confront problems and seek solutions than the rest of agriculture.”

Now, as if in reward for such forthright behavior, nature has dealt the rice growers and millers a strong hand. The end of California’s drought has meant the second largest rice harvest ever--while bad weather wreaked havoc on crops in most other competing rice regions.

The worst crisis is in Japan, whose rice seeds were used to launch California’s industry in the early 1900s but whose closed rice market has been a source of international trade tension for years.

An emergency shortage has forced the Japan Food Agency to scour world markets for rice. And only a few areas, notably California and Australia, have what the Japanese want: ready supplies of medium-grain japonica table rice that is said to be at least as good as--and far cheaper than--Japan’s own.

Japan’s entry into a thinly traded world market has sent prices of medium-grain rice soaring 60% since early September, and rice market analysts expect them to at least double.

“My phone started ringing off the hook in late September,” said Nick Greco, an independent grower-marketer who farms 450 acres near Lincoln on the rice bowl’s eastern rim.

“Every call, the price would go up. They would call me at night, and then by the time they would reach me in my truck the next morning, the price would be 25 cents higher,” Greco said. “It’s a big, pleasant surprise.”

Reisner, author of “Cadillac Desert,” a critically acclaimed 1986 attack on federal water policies in the West, notes that the steps rice growers have taken to reduce burning, cut water consumption and ease pesticide use have cost them money and yield: “I hope they make a lot of money. They deserve to make it up somewhere.”

Except in emergencies, Japan has refused to import rice from here or anywhere else for at least 20 years. But California’s rice industry still bears the deep cultural and agronomic imprint of the Japanese.

Japanese rice varieties were the genetic basis for most of the rice developed since 1912 at the Rice Experiment Station in Biggs, whose publicly available seeds account for more than 90% of the rice grown in the state.

And the legacy of one-time California “rice king” Keisaburo Koda, a Japanese immigrant who farmed 9,000 acres in the San Joaquin Valley until his internment in World War II, lives on today at Koda Farms, in South Dos Palos. His son and grandchildren grow a proprietary premium rice--Kokuho Rose--for U.S. markets and restaurants catering to people of Japanese heritage.

Indeed, California’s burgeoning Asian population has helped fuel a 50% jump in per capita consumption of rice over the past decade. That gave rise to Asian-language brand names--mostly Japanese--on California-grown products that are typically sold by Japanese- or Japanese American-owned distribution companies and have attracted a wide following in ethnic communities.

In addition to consumers, the rice buyers include at least five Japanese-owned sake breweries in California. Among them is a $16-million Folsom brewery built in 1989 by 356-year-old Gekkeikan Sake, Japan’s biggest maker of the rice-based alcoholic drink and official sake purveyor to the Imperial Household.

The rice Gekkeikan buys from selected growers in Colusa County is “very, very good,” said Shoichi Toda, president of Gekkeikan Sake USA Inc. “And a reasonable price,” far less expensive than in Japan, he added.

It is this conceded affordability and quality of California rice--not its modest economic importance--that have made Japan’s refusal to import it such a prominent symbol of Japan’s perceived intransigence on trade issues.

At $219 million in revenues last year, rice ranked only 17th among California crops. And industry experts say constraints of water, land and domestic customers mean that the state could never supply more than 5% of Japan’s huge market, nor could all the world’s producers fill more than 10%.

But to protect its politically powerful rice farmers in the name of secure domestic supplies of rice, the Japanese government runs a closed rice distribution system that charges consumers eight to 10 times more than the world price. In Japan, rice is a dietary staple and an essential part of ceremonies ranging from marriage to the deification of ancestral spirits.

Under the new emergency guidelines, Japan is expected to get rice for noodles, flour and brewing from Thailand and table rice from Australia and California. California growers could sell up to 500,000 tons to Japan over the next year, or one-third of their annual crop, said Ralph Newman Jr., president of Farmer’s Rice Cooperative in Sacramento.

Japan reiterated at the Seattle meetings that its new import policy will last only long enough to fill a shortfall estimated at 2.5 million tons, or one-fourth of the nation’s annual demand. But the nation’s negotiators in Geneva, where a Dec. 15 deadline looms for the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, have signaled a willingness to permanently lower Japan’s rice barriers.

“The Japanese will tell you it’s a one-shot deal,” Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy said in California on his way home from a visit to Japan last month, “but while I can’t go into too much detail, look at the smile on my face.”

It remains to be seen if Japanese consumers will know when they are eating California rice. Though it is being shipped in clearly identified bags, observers expect the imported rice to be commingled with home-grown varieties--ostensibly to prevent the foreign rice from being rejected by consumers but more likely, skeptics say, to prevent consumers from developing a liking for it.

Although imports could make just a small dent in the Japanese market, permanent access to such a premium market for their japonica rice would be a major boon to California growers.

“Nobody’s willing to pay as much as the Japanese,” said John Roberts, director of the California Rice Industry Assn. in Sacramento.

Higher prices, rather than more rice, will have to be the economic salvation of California’s rice industry, said Roberts and others. The reasons are soil, water and politics.

Just 440,000 California acres were planted in rice this year, and no more than 600,000 acres have soils that will hold water for months with little seepage. Leveled by laser-equipped field rigs and bordered by shallow dirt levies that trap the water, the rice paddies resemble a vast series of wading pools across much of the Sacramento Valley each summer. They are seeded aerially, an innovation pioneered by Koda.

Little else grows on such soils. But the large volumes of water consumed by rice production, pesticide runoff from rice fields into the Sacramento River and the annual burning of rice straw left behind by harvesters called into question the logic of tolerating such a troublesome industry--one supported by federal subsidies to boot while supplying less than 2% of the world’s rice.

So it was a case of enlightened self-interest when farmers invited naturalist Reisner up to the rice fields in 1991. They persuaded him of the virtues of rice land--including a unique potential to store water in winter for ducks and geese and, later, for urban use.

“The rice crop amounts to a special circumstance,” Reisner says today.

The serendipitous fact is that one alternative to burning rice straw is flooding the fields in winter, a practice followed by some growers for years to attract wildfowl for commercial hunting.

Hundreds of species of birds and other creatures, including 21 designated as endangered, inhabit the rice fields, which are on the path of the great Pacific Flyway, a key migratory route.

Before the massive California water projects were begun in the 1930s, the region was naturally flooded by runoff, creating wetlands that once attracted 150 million ducks, geese and other birds annually.

But when Shasta, Oroville and other dams began capturing and holding water, the wetlands dried up, and the bird population has tumbled to 5 million.

Nor did rice production benefit much from the dams. Growers’ rights to surface water from the Sacramento, Yuba, Bear and other rivers predate the federal Central Valley Project, and about 83% of the water used to grow rice is unsubsidized.

Today, Reisner is guiding a “Ricelands to Wetlands” project linking the rice growers, the Nature Conservancy, Ducks Unlimited and other groups. The project flooded about 5,000 acres of rice lands last year and is flooding four times as much this winter.

The fields, covered with tons of rice missed by the harvesters, are a smorgasbord for wildfowl. They trample and peck at the straw and other organic debris through the shallow water, and by spring the once-bulky material that used to be burned is the consistency of tissue paper, no longer an obstacle to planting.

Reisner has more ambitious ideas. He envisions the rice fields as mini-reservoirs that could substitute for the additional dams that some groups want to build in California. By building up the levies several feet, he figures, the rice fields could “store” 200,000 acre-feet of water that could be released to, say, Los Angeles.

Such schemes are fraught with problems, and even the flooding under way is an imperfect solution, expensive for the growers and a threat to spawning salmon. Meanwhile, despite new techniques and “dwarf” varieties of rice that use 65% less water per acre than in the 1960s, rice remains one of the biggest users of water in California.

But to Reisner, the significant thing is that common ground has been found between farmers and environmentalists.

He lavishly credits the rice industry.

“I can’t think of another consensus effort between agriculture and conservation that’s this ambitious,” Reisner said. “Those kinds of actions impress me tremendously, and that’s why I’ve decided to support them.”

Eyeing the new export prospects, he added cautiously: “I hope they don’t expand their acreage by too much. I’m still concerned about the amount of water they use. If the Japanese market really cracked open for them and they tried to go back up to 600,000 acres, I don’t think that much water’s even there.”

But there are no such mixed feelings at the Port of Sacramento as longshoremen load rice aboard the Japanese-flag Koala for probable Wednesday shipment. The new business will double the inland port’s projected rice shipments, boost total export tonnage 20% and add 150 jobs, said John Sulpizio, assistant port director.

It also brings back memories. “The first ship we ever loaded when we opened in 1963,” Sulpizio said, “had California rice bound for Japan.”