California’s Rice Royalty Is Stepping Down
Koda Farms, a family-run rice business revered by chefs, ends a century-long tradition.
When the water is cut in August, the rice fields of South Dos Palos, Calif., go from green to gold. As the plants dry, Robin and Ross Koda, the brother and sister duo who manage Koda Farms, wait for just the right moment to harvest.
Keisaburo Koda, their grandfather, started the family rice business in Central California 97 years ago. Koda Farms developed Kokuho Rose, a new rice variety first sold in the 1960s, and influenced generations of chefs to cook with excellent, American-grown Japanese-style rice.
But this fall, there will be no new crop rice for sale on the family homestead. Koda Farms is closing up shop. “People really romanticize farming,” Ms. Koda said, “but it’s becoming more and more challenging.”
She pointed to the soaring cost of water for farms in California, a surge in insurance premiums and the cost of organic fertilizer, gas and new equipment, along with the small and aging labor pool in rural Merced County. On top of those grievances, which are familiar to most farmers, Koda has been dedicated to growing a particularly low-yielding heirloom rice on poor adobe soil.
“Kokuho Rose was a modern rice in my grandfather’s era,” Ms. Koda said. “But now it’s antiquated: too tall, too slow-growing, too low-yielding.”
The family didn’t have a succession plan, but saw a way to keep their legacy alive by licensing five of their trademarks to Western Foods, a grain manufacturer in Woodland, Calif.
Miguel Reyna, Western’s president, said it will continue to farm some Kokuho Rose rice in Dos Palos, but will ramp up farming in the Sacramento Delta region and move all processing and packaging to Northern California. Some of Koda’s Blue Star Mochiko and Diamond K rice flours may also be processed at the company’s mill in Arkansas.
Koda Farms is small compared with the sprawling rice farms in the Sacramento Valley, but its rice is cherished by cooks. When Ms. Koda shared on Instagram the news that she and her brother would be stepping down, it sent out waves of panic among some chefs.
Minh Phan, a chef whose scrappy Los Angeles restaurant Porridge + Puffs, now closed, was built on bowls of rice, praised the fragrant, intact Kokuho Rose grains, particularly the new crop that required less water to cook. “That rice smells like the top of a baby’s head after a bath,” she said. “Milky, sweet, starchy, fresh.”
Brandon Jew has served Kokuho Rose rice at Mister Jiu’s in San Francisco since the restaurant opened in 2016. When diners ask how he cooks the rice, he always points out that it isn’t so much a secret technique as the quality of the rice. (The restaurant kitchen uses rice cookers.)
“I almost feel like the success of what we do is based on a lot of these really special ingredients that are coming locally,” said Mr. Jew, explaining how visionary, multigenerational food businesses piece together the larger, complicated stories of Asian Americans.
Keisaburo Koda was the dynamic, entrepreneurial second son of a rice miller and former samurai from Fukushima Prefecture. He arrived in California in 1908, drilling for oil as a wildcatter in the mountains surrounding Coalinga. He later opened tuna canneries on the coast for Japanese American fishing vessels, among other business ventures. All the while, he had a vision for an American rice farm in which he’d control the supply chain, from seed to bag.
Mr. Koda traveled farther and farther south until 1927, when he finally found a landowner in the southwest corner of Merced County who would sell to a Japanese man and his family. Over the years, he became known as the “Rice King of California.”
Mr. Koda grew his own rice seed and acquired two airplanes to start aerial seeding, a technique he helped to pioneer. He set up a mill to finish and package the rice, along with a small hog farm so that the bran, a byproduct of the rice processing that can be used as animal feed, wouldn’t go to waste.
But anti-Japanese sentiment was surging in the early 1940s and the Koda family was incarcerated during World War II. “We never overcame the hit they took during internment,” said Ms. Koda, 61. “We were never able to get back to the amount of land ownership that our grandfather started off with.”
When the Koda family got home from Camp Amache in Granada, Colo., in 1945, they found that only 1,000 acres of land still belonged to them. Their most valuable equipment, both of their planes, all of their livestock, their worker housing and 9,000 acres of their best and most high-yielding land — it had all been taken away.
Mr. Koda, this time with his grown sons, started the business again from scratch. They hired Arthur Hughes Williams, a rice breeder, to experiment crossing short-grain Japanese rice with long-grain Assyrian rice. The family trademarked what they called Kokuho Rose, a fragrant medium-grain rice variety bred to thrive in Koda’s specific microclimate and soil.
Ross Koda ships some of that rice to Ninki Shuzo, a sake brewery back in the family’s home precinct, and his Uka sake is poured in restaurants, including the acclaimed n/naka in Los Angeles.
The siblings grew up on their family farm and mill, surrounded by warehouses and industrial dryers, and have carried their grandfather’s legacy for decades. Ms. Koda described the work as a true labor of love.
“For what our parents and grandparents went through, we feel a huge sense of obligation, but in another sense I feel like it’s time to move on,” Ms. Koda said. “My grandfather reinvented himself so many times after immigrating here — I think if he were in our boots he’d say, yes, it’s time to move on.”
Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.
Aug. 12, 2024