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New Waves of Grain

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How the Lundberg family farm went organic and helped change the rice America eats.

By Mark Scarborough, for EatingWell Magazine, March/April 2008

Healthy Rice Recipes | More Rice Articles

Harvest was in full swing when I arrived last fall at the Lundbergs’ rice fields north of Sacramento. Everyone was preoccupied: quotas, yields, organic checks. They wanted to keep me busy, and out of the way.

The 17,000-acre Lundberg Family Farms is one of the largest producers of organic rice in the country and an innovator in developing many of the new whole-grain varieties available across the U.S. today. It started back in 1937 with a 40-acre plot Albert and Frances Lundberg bought as they fled the Dust Bowl in Nebraska. In the late ’50s, the farm was passed to their sons—Eldon, Wendell, Homer and Harlan—who bought up more land in the valley.

Today, this successful operation has passed to the third generation, overseen by Jessica Lundberg, the soft-spoken, pragmatic board chair and nursery manager, and her more untamed, Aristotle-spouting cousin, Grant, the CEO.

“Would you like to see the fields from the air?” Jessica asked me. “We have an experienced pilot.”

I should have asked, “How experienced?” as she was referring to her father, affable but laconic Wendell Lundberg, age 77, one of those four brothers.

Wendell taxied the plane onto a potholed runway with threshing machines going full-tilt alongside us. As we banked into the throb of afternoon light, I saw what modern rice production does to the land. It wasn’t the traditional paddies, wetlands or idyllic bit of fairy-tale Asia that I had expected.

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Healthy Rice Recipes:

Dirty Rice
Black Rice Curried Meatloaf
Crab Pilaf
Brown Rice & Goat Cheese Cakes
Brown Rice & Tofu Maki
Brown Rice & Greens
Baked Curried Brown Rice & Lentil Pilaf
Asian Brown Rice

Learn More:

Discover 7 sumptuous whole-grain rices and cooking ideas in our Whole-Grain Rice Buyer's Guide.
Learn how to cook a variety of whole grains in our Grains Cooking Guide.
Kitchen Technique: Make your own sushi rolls.

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