CALIFORNIA
Field Crops A SPECIAL GROWERS’ REPORT OF AG ALERT ®
Sake brewers look to the Sacramento Valley for rice By Caleb Hampton Colusa County rice farmer Carissa Lee procures rice from Sacramento Valley growers for Sun Valley Rice Co. Since 2011, Valley Select, a sister company of Sun Valley, has milled rice so that it can be used by brewers of sake, a Japanese rice wine. During the past decade, California rice sales to sake makers increased as the beverage’s popularity rose among U.S. consumers.
Most of the rice grown in California is a medium-grain variety called Calrose. The Sacramento Valley—the state’s predominant rice-producing region—is home to about 500,000 acres of the cereal grain each year. Valley Select, a sister company of Sun Valley, also produces a sake rice variety called Yamada Nishiki. The company exclusively sourced a small amount of seed from Japan and spent years building its supply before being able to grow the special variety on a commercial scale. “The king of sake rice,” as O’Donnell calls Yamada Nishiki, is hard to grow, and the plant grows more than twice as tall as Calrose, making it more difficult to machine harvest. When Sun Valley opened in 2000, “it was really the beginning of the sushi boom,” O’Donnell said, with high demand for Calrose from restaurants in Asia, Europe and America. In 2011, Valley Select took note of the demand for rice from sake makers and began milling rice for sake. Since then, the company’s sake milling operation has steadily grown. The mill plays an important role in determining the quality of the beverage. That’s be- cause sake is categorized by the level of polish on the rice kernels used to make it. Premium sake is typically made from highly polished rice, the kernels whittled down to about half their original size to get rid of the outer layers of fats, minerals and proteins that can create overbearing flavors and aromas. The starchy center that’s left is called the shinpaku, or “white heart.”
Farmers in the Sacramento Valley have cultivated rice for more than a century. The cli- mate and soil in the valley, which lies at the same latitude as Japan’s rice-growing region, are ideal for growing short- and medium-grain japonica rice, also called sticky rice. For the past few decades, much of the Golden State’s crop has been exported to Asia and Europe, primarily for sushi. But lately, a small but growing share of California’s rice has been sold to producers of sake, a Japanese rice wine that dates to the third century. The beverage has been among the fastest-growing alcohol categories in the U.S. in recent years, making a leap during the pandemic when people bought it to go with their takeout sushi. Several large Japanese-headquartered sake makers have brewing and distribution facilities in California, and earlier this year, Smithsonian Magazine called the emerging craft sake brewing scene in the U.S. “a movement.” “The demand continues to grow,” said Erin O’Donnell, former vice president of sales at Sun Valley Rice Co., which operates a rice mill in the Colusa County town of Arbuckle. Carissa Lee, a third-generation rice farmer in Colusa County, grows around 1,000 acres of rice and works as a procurer for Sun Valley, sourcing rice from nearly 200 family farms in the Sacramento Valley. About two weeks before harvest, Lee and other farmers pull the water off the crop to dry it out and mature the kernels before cutting the rice with a harvester. In the winter, rice farmers typically flood their fields to provide wetland habitat for waterfowl migrating along the Pacific Flyway.
See SAKE, Page 11
10 Ag Alert June 18, 2025
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