SACRAMENTO, Calif. — For years, the short grain rice grown on the fields managed by Jon Munger has been used to create delicious sushi around the country.

His flooded fields, right now, are not growing anything humans care much for. It is food for salmon.

“Doing these practices during the off season or in the winter time is a great partnership. And goes hand-in-hand with our production,” said Jon Munger, Vice President of Operations at Montna Farms. “We’re flooding our fields here in the winter to decompose our rice straw. So, if we can provide another environmental benefit such as providing fish food and enhance the overall water fowl or shore bird type of habitat we have here, it’s great.”

Researcher Jacob Katz has been studying the benefits rice fields can have for critical salmon populations. His team started by putting baby salmon in cages in rice fields to see how well they would grow.

The team found salmon grew five times larger and stronger than baby salmon in the river, from the naturally occurring food produced in rice fields that doesn’t occur in river systems.

“Rice fields are like wetlands, and wetlands are where the food is,” said Katz. “The rivers themselves are these thin blue lines between steep levees and there’s very little food in there. The food’s made out in the wetlands. Most of those wetlands have been converted into agriculture, but if we flood those fields and we mimic the wetlands that were here before, we can create the food and put it back into the rivers where the fish so desperately need it.”

Over 90% of the state’s wetlands have been lost because of dams and flood levees.

Katz said the still water in flooded fields is more easily heated by the sun and is how the shrimp like soup is created that fish feed off, which salmon used to have access to. 

He said currently they have 50,000 acres working to put food back into the rivers, but they need a lot more.

“Rice fields and other fields that are flooded in winter to mimic the natural flooding that creates the habitat that is critical for ducks, for geese, for fish. We need that on the level of 100-200,000 acres annually,” said Katz.

Caltrout, through grants, can offset some costs associated with flooding the enrolled farms such as Montna Farms.

According to Katz, after the fields are flooded, it takes three weeks for enough of the little shrimp-like animals to fill the fields. For enough food to get to the baby salmon, he said they need to drain the fields three times during winter.

Munger said they plan to continue being part of the program.

“It’s a great fit for our farm,” he said.

And he is happy to show how farming and fish can coexist.