Lopes Family Farms
Princeton, CA
About
Our family has been farming for over 100 years as Charles Lopes and Sons but in the last few years we have started milling and selling our own rice through a new venture called Lopes Family Farms. During the drought in 2020 we worked towards adopting the duck rice farming method to become a regenerative rice farm on top of our 23 years of being certified organic on 60 acres of our property. Last year we were able to get our full 203 acres certified organic! By using the transplanting process and the ducks to weed and fertilize the rice fields we learned that we could use 2/3rds less water to grow organic rice than we normally would. Thanks to the ducks we are able to grow incredibly sustainable rice in California that improves soil health. We are the first duck rice farm in the state and first organic certified one in the USA. We are currently growing 17 acres using this method but are trying to scale up and start a movement to get more farms to adopt this method so the food system becomes more resilient to a changing climate. Help support our mission to improve the food system and educate more people about the benefits of regenerative farming.
Top crops
We grow 180 acres of organic rice and 20 acres using a regenerative practice called duck rice farming where we use 100s of ducks to do manage the weeds, pests and fertilize our fields. The organic certification is under our parent farm Charles Lopes & Sons. We started Lopes Family Farms to build our brand for B2B and B2C sales. We grow Calrose medium grain which we mill to brown rice. We also grow 3 acres of specialty sake rice with plans to expand to more acres. We harvest in October/November and yield roughly 5000 pounds per acre on average totals 1,000,000 pounds whole paddy which results in 700,000 pounds milled to brown. we grew 95 acres on commodity contract which is sold and we have 500,000 pounds we plan to mill and sell to School District, sake breweries, restaurants, and we are planning on entering the retail market. Of the 500,000 pounds we have 45,000 pounds that was grown using the duck rice method. That is primarily going to school districts.
