Helping Hand for Nature
Volunteers save waterfowl eggs as part of one family’s environmentally friendly farming effort
By Mary Weston and Douglas Fischer - OROVILLE MERCURY-REGISTER, AND STAFF WRITER

Every spring the farm turns to volunteers and schoolchildren to help gather eggs, such as these mallard eggs, before spring plowing.

RICHVALE: AT LUNDBERG FAMILY FARMS here in the middle of California's rice belt, it's not the rice that matters most right about now, or even the forecast for the coming water year, which looks fine.
It's the mallards and the pintails and other waterfowl that have wintered in the Lundbergs' fields and now tend to down-lined nests cradling six or seven or 11 eggs apiece.

The fields need to be plowed.

The ducks are not quite ready.

Every year, after the rice crop has turned golden and been harvested and the winter rains returned, the Lundbergs plant purple vetch on their organic fields to return nitrogen to the soil.

Other local fields get flooded, and the combination — the new ponds and the lush vetch — prove irresistible to waterfowl.

They arrive by the thousands, settling in, making nests, getting fat. It's all part of what the Lundbergs, who have 3,000 acres in Butte County and have been farming the land since 1937, consider their obligation as organic growers.

But come spring, as the days lengthen and the soil warms, the new crop needs to go in before the nests are empty.

"Oh, my God, I found it!" gushed Taylor Haury of Richvale Elementary School, staring down into a nest of 11 blue-green eggs a mallard henhad just abandoned.

"Feel them, they're still warm," said classmate Sal Gomez, 11, cradling some in his hands.

Since 1993, the Lundbergs have gathered farmhands and volunteers in spring to walk their fields, knee-high in purple vetch, to rescue eggs. They drag ropes and rattle cans, scaring fowl from nests. Gathered eggs go to a private facility to be incubated and hatched.

The Wild Egg Salvage Program returns about 2,500 ducks to the wild every year.

"Our major goal is providing healthy food and a healthy environment for people and wildlife," said Homer Lundberg, who with brothers Wendell, Eldon and Harlan are the second Lundberg generation to farm rice here, 70 miles north of Sacramento. They recently passed the operation on to the third, their children.

Recently, about 100 local students walked a 10-acre field, finding eggs and learning a bit about how the farm helps the environment.

Egg Aid is just one way the family practices what it calls environmentally friendly farming. It complements other

organic and ecological farm methods, including crop rotation, planting ground covers to replenish the soil and not burning the rice fields — a cost-saving measure that has been banned in California since the 1990s for air-quality reasons.

The family grows several varieties of organic rice, which it sells at the family store in Richvale and in stores around the nation. Varieties range from wild and brown rices to jasmines to Italian sweet rices.

Almost 80,000 acres in Butte County is devoted to rice crops, 15 percent of the 550,000 acres planted in California annually. The county's rock-hard adobe soil, with a hard pan 30 inches down, offers ideal water retention when fields are flooded. Combined with a growing-season's worth of sunny days, the county is the perfect place to grow rice. That hard pan once underlaid much of the Central Valley, making it the perfect wetland. Historical accounts abound of flocks of waterfowl so dense they filled the sky — and of farmers using dynamite to blast the cement-like pan so their fields would drain.

So in some ways the Lundbergs' program is an effort to bring some of that back.

Gary Kerhoulas, director and co-founder of District 10 Wild Duck Eggs, has worked with the Lundbergs from the start to rescue and incubate the eggs. Over the years he's developed respect for the brothers' continual pursuit of eco-friendly farming methods.

"These guys are all 70-plus years old, and they're still looking for ways to improve their farming methods and protect the environment," Kerhoulas said.

Though the brothers are heading off to retirement, the notion that farming needs to be more than putting food on the table isn't.

"When you look at a piece of land, it's not just about the food it produces," said Michael Straus, a member of Marin County's Straus dairy family who helped his family's operation go organic and now heads up a San Francisco-based consulting firm specializing in environmental issues.

"It's about the other things it brings to the community: open space, issues concerning clean water, preserving wildlife and endangered species.

"Organic agriculture and organic foods are simply a point in the process of developing a broader understanding about the role of food and agriculture."

In other words, the discussion that starts with organic practices is moving on to labor relations, worker rights, health and the environment, Straus said.

But the Lundberg solution — or the organic solution, for that matter — is not a "one-size-fits-all" solution for farmers, said University of California, Davis, Extension agronomist Jim Hill.

The vetch crop itself takes extra work, and it won't attract the waterfowl without other flooded fields nearby, he said. About half of California's rice fields are flooded in winter.

"It's not free nitrogen, not by any means," he said. "And the vetch program is not a habitat program per se. You can't flood the vetch in the winter."

For the Lundbergs, there's no other way to go. They tried spraying once, before they went organic. It killed everything in the field, Wendell Lundberg said.

"That's when we realized there were risks associated with using chemicals," he added. "Our father always told us to leave the land better than it was when we found it, so we looked for other methods."

So today they place brooding boxes along their fields for wood ducks, barn owls and bats, to protect them from predators. They plant vetch.

And they collect eggs.

By noon on a recent sun-kissed Thursday, the students had cleared the field of eggs. Kaiben Casgy, 11, of Durham Elementary School said his class has been studying endangered species. On this trip, he saw how one farm family helps.

"I'm learning about saving the eggs," he said, "so ducks don't become endangered or extinct."


Mary Weston writes for the Oroville Mercury-Register, a sister paper. Contact Douglas Fischer at dfischer@angnewspapers.com.