Rice acreage is growing rapidly in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta’s agricultural core.
It nearly tripled in the Delta’s Primary Zone between 2018 and 2022, according to data compiled for the Delta Protection Commission’s March 2025 Socioeconomic Indicators Update (PDF). That took it from the zone’s No. 11 crop to No. 9.
RICE ACREAGE IN THE DELTA (Cropscape data)
Zone
2018
2022
Change
Primary
4,808
14,095
193%
Secondary
1,988
3,083
55%
TOTAL
6,796
17,178
153%
Rice acreage is still dwarfed by corn. At nearly 60,000 acres, corn remained the Primary Zone’s No. 2 crop in 2022. But corn acreage is falling: It dropped 43% in the same period rice was rising.
“We could be looking at 15,000-20,000 acres of rice in the Delta this year,” said Michelle Leinfelder-Miles, Delta Crops Resource Management Advisor for the UC Cooperative Extension.
“I’m learning of rice going in places it hasn’t gone before,” she said. “The Delta community seems really coalesced on developing a rice industry.”
Why Is This Changing?
Both crops grow well in the Delta’s core, where high water tables limit what thrives. So why is rice gaining favor?
One reason is profit.
Staten Island now has 4,500 acres in rice, up from 300 in 2019. “It’s been more profitable than corn, 100%,” said Jerred Dixon, who manages the property as a living laboratory of wildlife-friendly farming for The Nature Conservancy.
“I make really good money growing rice,” said Dixon, who is also a member of the Delta Protection Advisory Committee. “You plant it, you watch it, then you harvest it. It’s not a very labor-intensive crop.”
Jerred Dixon inspects drill-seeded rice on Staten Island during planting in April. Staten has shifted substantial acreage from corn to rice.
It’s also immune to one of the biggest challenges to growing rice farther north in the Sacramento Valley: water availability. The Delta always has water, even in drought. The biggest concern with Delta water is salinity levels.
But another reason for the shifting agricultural mosaic is self-preservation. Corn exacerbates a serious problem: subsidence. Rice doesn’t.
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What Is Subsidence?
The organic materials in the Delta’s peat soil oxidize when they hit air, turning into carbon dioxide. The soil disappears; the elevation drops.
After a more than a century of growing dry-soil crops on lands that were drained for farming, islands in the Delta’s core sit as much as 24 feet or more below sea level. That’s a double whammy for levees that sit at sea level.
First, levees are threatened by the sheer pressure of river water that sits higher than the islands, which can lead to levee breaks. Second, that water can also start moving soil particles underneath the levee, leading to a collapse. “That’s what happened on Victoria Island last year,” said Steve Deverel, Principal Hydrologist of HydroFocus.
Both issues elevate the risk of floods that can turn farms into an inland sea, permanently.
How Is Rice Better?
Re-wetting the soil stops the oxidation, preventing further subsidence.
There are two ways to re-wet the soil: restoring wetlands or converting to flooded crops like rice.
Wetlands actually rebuild the soil, albeit slowly – it could take 150 years to restore elevations on some Delta Islands. But wetlands don’t produce a crop, and convincing a farmer to forego a way of life is a tough sell, at best.
Rice fields aren’t flooded year-round, so they don’t have as much subsidence benefit as permanent wetlands. But rice is a substantial improvement over dry-field farming, and it helps maintain the farm economy and Delta livelihoods.
The Delta Protection Act calls for the preservation of agricultural viability in the Delta. Loss of working farmland can hollow out the critical mass needed for local farm services, leading to a downward spiral in the linchpin of the region’s economy.
Loss of farm revenue brings additional risks: Agricultural revenue pays for levee maintenance in much of the Delta, where myriad reclamation districts were established to reclaim islands from tidewater.
“The overarching benefit (to rice) in my mind is levee stability and water supply reliability,” Deverel said.
Rice planting on Staten Island in April
Where Is State Policy on All of This?
There is a lot of activity aimed at re-wetting soil in the Delta’s most subsided lands, but not just because of subsidence.
While subsidence is a grave local threat, its byproduct is a global one, because carbon dioxide warms the atmosphere. Because of the dynamic with peat soil, the Delta produces 21% of the state’s non-animal farming greenhouse gases, while it is home to only 6% of the state’s plant-based farming.[i]
California has committed to net-zero carbon emissions by 2045, and a recent state law – AB 1757 – requires setting ambitious targets for nature-based solutions. Part of the plan to reach those targets is re-wetting 50,000 of the 150,000 most subsided acres in the Delta[ii], whether with wetlands or rice.
“The 150,000-acre area we’re focused on is highly organic, deeply subsided, and very likely not viable for the future,” said Campbell Ingram, Executive Officer of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Conservancy. “It’s the landowner’s choice, but unless they’re re-wetting the soil, they literally are digging that hole deeper every day.”
The Conservancy has awarded more than $34 million in Nature Based Solution grants to restore wetlands and help farmers convert to rice in the Delta. The rice conversion funding will add about 5,500 acres – a substantial increase for the Delta.
Conversion costs are one of the biggest obstacles to growing rice, because rice requires specialized water infrastructure and GPS-leveled land for optimal production.
“The viability of these lands is very much in doubt over the long term,” Ingram said. “What we’re incentivizing is a way to try to keep your land viable.”
A harvested rice field adjacent to a wetland in the Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area (PHOTO: Department of Water Resources)
Another Perk of Rice: (Paid) Wildlife Benefits
Rice in the Sacramento Valley has long been lauded as “surrogate wetlands” for waterbird habitat.
Traditionally in California, rice farmers burned rice straw after the harvest to prepare fields for spring planting, but burning was sharply curtailed in the 1990s to improve air quality in the Central Valley. Many farmers switched to winter flooding to decompose rice straw, providing hundreds of thousands of acres of habitat for waterfowl and shorebirds that migrate here during the winter.
Farmers can monetize this. Flooded rice fields that attract waterfowl can be leased to duck hunters. In addition, the BirdReturns program pays farmers and wetland managers to flood fields to appropriate depths for shorebirds at key times during the migration.
A recent UC Davis study highlights even broader wildlife benefit to keeping a mosaic of rice and wetlands on the landscape. It concluded 500,000 acres of winter-flooded rice is needed in California to support not only the waterbirds, but also sandhill cranes, giant garter snakes (listed as “threatened” on the Endangered Species List), and fish, particularly the endangered winter run chinook salmon.
How Does Rice Help Fish?
The fish benefit stems from rice fields’ unintentional second crop: zooplankton. When you add shallow water to land and keep it flooded for at least three weeks, the dissolved carbon leads to bacterial growth that creates an explosion of small invertebrates collectively called zooplankton. Zooplankton makes great fish food.
Prior to the arrival of modern agriculture – and, importantly, the levees that enable it – fish could often swim freely between river channels and shallow-flooded wetlands, where they grew fat on zooplankton. Levees sever that connection, constraining fish to fast-moving river channels that are fish-food deserts. This is one of many factors contributing to the decline of salmon and other native fish populations.
In the Sacramento Valley, researchers have experimented with connecting waterways to historic off-channel landscapes, which now include winter-flooded rice fields, to allow young salmon access. That premise is a central feature of the “Big Notch” project in the Yolo Bypass. Until recently, Fremont Weir has directed water into the Yolo Bypass only when river levels threaten to flood cities. Now, a notch cut into the weir will allow flooding more frequently to benefit fish.
This process, known as reactivating the floodplain, isn’t feasible in the deeply subsided parts of the Delta, where there’s a 25-foot drop from river to farm fields.
But that’s not the only way to feed fish: Farmers can also pump zooplankton-rich water out of their fields and into fish-bearing waterways. This mimics the effect of winter flooding, which pours zooplankton from shallow wetlands into temporarily connected rivers.
CalTrout has a program that pays landowners to grow “zoop soup” and pump it into canals and rivers during key fish migration times in the winter. Its research is showing fish do indeed get fatter from these releases, even as much as six miles downstream, increasing their chances of surviving long enough to spawn.
Tantalizing new research that studies markers deposited in salmon eyeball lenses suggests salmon that feed on floodplain food have a better chance of reaching adulthood.
The sample sizes have been small, but the results are remarkable: Among fall-run chinook salmon, 9% to 16% headed into the ocean showed markers of having fed from floodplain sources, while 45% to 73% that returned to spawn showed those markers. This suggests “floodplain fatties” have an advantage in the survival game.
“We can have both wildlife abundance and agricultural abundance,” said CalTrout Senior Scientist Jacob Katz. “They don’t have to be at odds.”
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What’s needed to enlist farmers’ help rewetting Delta soil to meet climate, land subsidence, and fish and wildlife goals without losing their livelihood and way of life?
Re-wetting the Delta has already begun. Wetland restorations have been concentrated on government-owned lands, where profits aren’t a consideration, as well as on portions of agricultural land that have become unfarmable due to loss of land elevation.
Converting from dry-soil crops to rice, though, requires some assistance because it represents a cultural change from familiar, successful, longstanding farming practices.
Sources we consulted with recommended the following options:
More grant funding to help with conversion to rice (leveling land, installing specialized water infrastructure). One appropriate new source is funding from Proposition 4, the 2024 voter-approved $10 billion general obligation bond for climate resilience, water, and natural resource management programs.
More grant funding to support wildlife-friendly practices such as timing flooding to serve migrating shorebirds and waterfowl, and to grow zooplankton and release it as pulses of migrating salmon pass by.
Grant funding to study alternatives that could optimize rice: “Alternative wetting and drying” involves draining rice fields for short periods at key times during plant growth to reduce the bacteria in the soil that release methane, a greenhouse gas. It trades a small increase in carbon emissions for a more substantial reduction in methane, increasing rice’s net greenhouse gas benefit. It has been studied elsewhere, but needs research to confirm it would work well in the Delta.
Policy and permitting support to bring rice-growing infrastructure to the Delta. Currently, Delta farmers have to ship their rice to the Sacramento Valley for drying.
Support and assistance for branding and marketing Delta rice. “The quality of rice that comes from the Delta is superb,” said Staten Island’s Jerred Dixon. “It would be great to have a Delta rice label in the future to showcase all the benefits that come from growing rice in the Delta.”
WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. (March 21, 2025) – Unemployment fell. Median income rose. Land in agricultural production increased. These improving socioeconomic indicators for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are highlights of a report released today by the Delta Protection Commission.
The Socioeconomic Indicators Update is the second report in an ongoing series providing a scorecard of key measures of wellbeing in the Delta, tracking them both over time and in comparison with the state as a whole. The first report (PDF) covered data from 2011 to 2016, and the update covers 2017 to 2022.
The release of the update includes public access to the source data. Data used in the report come from the National Center for Education Statistics, 2021 American Community Survey, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Cropscape and the California Public Utilities Commission.
“The Delta Protection Commission is committed to tracking the effects of the state’s Delta Plan on our region’s economy and quality of life,” said DPC Program Manager Virginia Gardiner, who co-led the update with Delta Stewardship Council Senior Environmental Scientist Chris Kwan, PhD.
“This scorecard does just that, and can be used by Delta residents, elected officials, and others to identify priories or needs for additional information.”
Key findings of the report include:
The unemployment rate dropped by 5.4 percentage points in the Secondary Zone, from 12.4% to 7%.
The 7% unemployment rate in the Delta was slightly higher than the statewide rate of 6.5%, but substantially lower than the San Joaquin Valley rate of 9.3%.
Both median household and median individual incomes for the Delta increased over the previous period and were higher than the state’s as a whole.
Land in agricultural production from 2017 to 2022 increased by over 10% over the 2011-2016 study period.
Continuing trends from the previous period, higher value crops were being planted, with corn coverage dropping and almonds increasing.
In 2022, 350,000 acres of land in the Primary Zone were in active agriculture: Top crops by total land cover were alfalfa, corn, grapes, clover/wildflowers, and winter wheat.
Road pavement conditions, a measure of quality of infrastructure and public safety, worsened compared with the previous period by over 20%.
The Delta Residents Survey, published in 2023, explores Delta residents’ sense of place, quality of life, risks/resilience to climate change, and civic engagement. The survey was conducted by the Delta Stewardship Council with researchers from UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and Oregon State. Read the survey summary here, and explore the data here.
By Holly Heyser Delta Protection Commission Rice acreage is growing rapidly in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta’s agricultural core. It nearly tripled in the Delta’s Primary Zone between 2018 and 2022, […]
WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. (March 21, 2025) – Unemployment fell. Median income rose. Land in agricultural production increased. These improving socioeconomic indicators for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are highlights of a […]
Pretty much the entire Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is a floodplain, where the chances of flooding in any given year are as high as 1 in 10 in some areas[1]. But […]
What policies would Delta residents support for adapting to environmental changes in the region? Given nine choices in a recent survey of Delta residents, only one garnered majority support: increasing […]
Explore more of the survey data yourself with this interactive web app. To learn more about flood preparedness in the Delta, please visit DeltaFloodReady.com.
Pretty much the entire Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is a floodplain, where the chances of flooding in any given year are as high as 1 in 10 in some areas[1].
But the Delta Residents Survey found that only about a third of rural Delta residents and a fifth of Delta city dwellers have flood insurance.
Studies show households without insurance take longer to recover[2].
Given the risk, the number of households with insurance may seem low. But Michael Mierzwa, a civil engineer for the California Department of Water Resources, noted this is actually above average. Statewide, about 2% of property owners have flood insurance.
He said there are two likely reasons for the Delta’s higher participation rate: One is the Delta’s generational experience with flooding. Memories run long here.
The other is that mortgages issued in flood-prone areas require flood insurance.
But is this participation rate good enough in the flood-prone Delta? No, Mierzwa said, it should be 100%. “You need something in that area. Even if you’re levee protected, the levees are not foolproof.”
Why Don’t More People Get Insurance?
Kathleen Schaefer, a doctoral student in civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis, said research shows three things will get people to invest in flood insurance:
The issue must rise to a level of concern. “The year we sold the most flood insurance policies in the state was the year of the Godzilla El Niño,” she said, referring to the winter of 2015-16.
Their neighbor buys flood insurance or they know someone who has it.
Flood insurance is affordable.
Affordability is a key issue in the Delta, where many of the small towns have high rates of poverty. This is why Schaefer has worked with the Delta Region Geologic Hazard Abatement District on a pilot program to provide inclusive flood insurance to property owners in Isleton.
Photos: Isleton flooded in 1972 following a levee break (photos: Department of Water Resources)
One goal of the program is providing a disaster recovery benefit in the event of a flood – a modest no-strings-attached payout to every property owner to help with the immediate costs of flooding, such as finding temporary housing in a hurry.
This is called parametric insurance, which provides a fixed benefit based on a pre-defined trigger, or parameter. For Isleton, it would pay if a sensor at the city’s wastewater pumping station detected more than 16 inches of water.
The payout would not be enough to cover the cost of repairing or rebuilding a flood-damaged home, Schaefer said, but the goal is to provide cash when households need it most.
And given that half of Isleton property owners don’t have flood insurance, Schaefer said, it’s a big improvement over the help people would get now. “Everyone pays a little, everyone gets a little,” she said.
She pointed out the National Flood Insurance Program doesn’t pay anything for alternative housing. And for what it does cover, the property owner must pay contractors with their own money first.
The Delta Region Geologic Hazard Abatement District
The pilot started two years ago when the city of Isleton formed the Delta Region Geologic Hazard Abatement District. Its boundaries are the same as the city’s, but it is a separate entity with authority for managing geologic and flood hazards.
The district was recently awarded pilot funding of $100,000 per year for two years by the Department of Water Resources. It will use the funding to work out the details, including how much the disaster recovery benefit will cost and how the money would be paid out.
The money can also be used to pay for the policy initially. But to get off the ground, the proposal will require voter approval, because property owners in the district would ultimately pick up the costs of the policy.
“The voters have to decide,” said City Councilman David Kent, who serves on the board of the district.
“What I want to do is make them a deal,” he said. “Your residence is in proximity of a 30-foot wall of water. The deal is the economy of scale at the government level can protect you. But it can’t do it without the standard mechanism of collecting funds.”
Schaefer puts it another way. “There are two certainties in life: We will all die, and levees will eventually fail. The big question is, which will come first?” she said. “We have life insurance to protect our families if we die before the levee fails. The goal of this program is to protect families if the levee dies first.”
Isleton as a Model
While parametric insurance is not a new concept, Kent said, funding it with a geologic hazard abatement district is. Only one other place has tried it – New York City – and that program has no long-term funding yet.
If Isleton is successful, the Department of Water Resources will be looking to apply what is learned there to other Central Valley communities interested in this kind of protection.
“The state’s role in this is to help them start the process,” said DWR’s Mierzwa. “What we get out of it is a community that’s more resilient, and we learn from the process and can help kick off community-based flood insurance in other small communities.”
The next Delta Region Geologic Hazard Abatement District board meeting will be held at 6:30 p.m. Nov. 20 at the Isleton Community Center. The public is invited to attend.
What policies would Delta residents support for adapting to environmental changes in the region? Given nine choices in a recent survey of Delta residents, only one garnered majority support: increasing state funding for sustainable agriculture. This is one example of what that looks like.
Rice farming can be an antidote to one big Delta problem: subsidence – the sinking of heavily farmed soils well below adjacent river levels.
But while flooded rice slowly rebuilds subsided soils, it comes with its own challenge: Water on those rice fields must be kept fresh for the crop to survive. That means pumping water off the fields and into the river, then pumping fresh water back in.
The fresh water is easy to come by on Staten Island, because the 9,200-acre farm’s riparian water rights have always met its needs.
But pumping water off the island has two costs: The biggest is the power bill to pump water 30 feet up and over a levee, which is on the order of $750,000 a year for the entire island. The other cost is that it is replaced by taking more water from the river.
A solution to this problem: Recirculate the water. Recirculation keeps it fresh, gives pesticides time to break down, and reduces how much water Staten Island has to take out of the river in the first place.
Building such a system is simple, said Jerred Dixon, director of the Staten Island Preserve. What’s not so simple is the permitting process. That’s where the Fish Friendly Farming program came in.
Operated by the California Land Stewardship Institute, Fish Friendly Farming works with farmers to reduce the amount of pesticides that leave their farms and get into rivers and streams. CLSI received a grant from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Conservancy to implement a Fish Friendly Farming program in the Delta, and one of the projects it completed with that grant was a recirculation system for a portion of Staten Island. (See a video about the project.)
Pumps push water up and over a 25-foot levee into the South Mokelumne River through four massive pipes.
For some farms that work with CLSI, being able to market themselves as Fish Friendly Farms is a huge selling point, particularly for vineyards that have more direct relationships with the consumers of their product, said CLSI Science Director Laurel Marcus.
But for others, what’s more important is helping them do the good things they want to do by easing the regulatory compliance burden. “The government gets what it needs, the growers get what they need, the environment gets what it needs,” she said.
That was one of the drivers for Staten Island, which is owned by The Nature Conservancy and used as a living laboratory for wildlife-friendly farming.
The other was mastering the process.
This effort was a first for CLSI and Staten Island, which means it went slowly – it took about a year and a half.
But the next effort will be easier. “The more you do things, the faster things usually go,” Dixon said. “You learn those quick routes and the shortcuts to get these things done.”
Jerred Dixon, director of the Staten Island Preserve, stands at the recirculation pump that was part of a Delta Conservancy Fish Friendly Farming grant project.
He would love to add more recirculation projects to the island. In addition to the rice land, Staten Island also has some wetlands where his goal is to use no water diverted from the river. “I could put 10 of these (recirculation pumps) on the island and make a real difference,” he said.
But he’d also love to see the practice take off throughout the Delta.
“If we can get this streamlined where we have a lot more recirculated water in the Delta, it makes water a lot more available, and it makes it more economically viable for Delta farmers as well,” he said.
“If you want to learn about it and get the lowdown, you can talk to me,” Dixon said. He can be emailed at jerred.dixon@cfrstaten.com.
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By Holly Heyser
