In 1906, the U.S. Department of Agriculture sent professor William Wylie Mackie to Northern California to study the soil. Mackie prophesied that the basin, flooded with overflow water at the time, would be the best rice-producing land in the world.
He was nearly right. In 1912, rice was finally grown on a commercial scale in Butte County. Today, it is the epicenter for rice production in California.
Credit, in fact, goes to Kenju Ikuta, a Japanese immigrant and an associate of Mackie’s who discovered that the desolate muddy land in Butte County, while not ideal for Chinese strains of rice, was extremely suitable for Japanese varieties. In conjunction with the government rice station at Biggs, just a couple of miles south of Richvale, Ikuta banded with local farmers to grow the first 55 acres.
Though the Japanese were not the first to grow rice in California, they were the first to make it incredibly profitable. Land prices increased four-fold. Property values soared, and soon bankers and land companies rushed in. Rice became one of the most profitable agricultural industries of the state, the new gold. But a backlash also arose as these more established Americans began to vilify the Asian settlers who had created this industry and, in their opinions, could steal jobs that were rightfully theirs.
