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New Waves of Grain

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The Lundburg brothers

Eldon, Wendell, Harlan, and Homer Lundberg

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After landing—no, I didn’t keep my eyes open—we pushed the plane into its hangar and I had a chance to ask Wendell about what had changed in the 50 years he and his brothers have farmed this land.

“Organic,” he said, dusting off his hands.

Back in the ’30s Dust Bowl, his parents, Albert and Frances Lundberg had been lured to California by unscrupulous salesmen who offered free tickets out west and promised Eden in a valley of poor clay. The soil was poor and, for the roots of trees and most vegetables, virtually impenetrable. After several false starts, they did as so many others were doing around them: they planted the only thing that would work—rice. Today, the valley weighs in at over 2 million tons of rice production a year. The Lundbergs account for roughly 2 percent of that, with 40,000 tons of rice a year.

Originally the Lundbergs didn’t grow organically. That had to wait for the ’60s, until some progressive, hippie types from Chico came down and asked Wendell and his brothers if they’d be willing to grow something called “pesticide-free” rice. The brothers obliged and soon realized that these hippies were tie-dyed entrepreneurs: they were selling that stuff for a profit back in town.

“My Dad thought, maybe these guys from up in Chico were onto something,” Jessica later told me, the business always first and foremost in her mind.

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