Weekend America

Saving Duck Eggs, Saving the Land

Nancy Mullane

MAY 17, 2008

Wild duck nest

(Nancy Mullane)

View the Slideshow

Rice is in the headlines lately. It's a staple in the diet of more than half the world's population -- now cyclones and droughts have hit some of the larger rice-producing countries, limiting stocks and raising the price.

But drought and rice production are also on the minds of people closer to home. In California, rice farmers are in the midst of planting their annual crop. But for one family farm in the Sacramento River Valley, before they can plant their rice, they have wild ducks and their eggs to deal with.

If you've every bought a bag of organic rice, odds are it came from one of the fields on the Lundberg Family Farm. It's the nation's largest producer of organic rice. This time of year, many of their fields are bright purple, thanks to a colorful cover-crop called vetch. It helps enrich the soil and also serves as a perfect nesting ground for wild ducks migrating along the Pacific Flyway.

That's just the sort of symbiotic relationship you'd expect on an organic farm. But this one has a hitch: Bryce Lundberg and his family have to plow up their fields before they can plant this year's rice crop, and the duck eggs haven't hatched yet.

"When the tractor goes through the field," Lundberg says, "it will chew up or destroy any eggs still in the field."

Most farmers just plow the fields, eggs and all. The Lundbergs have a different approach: Each year they invite dozens of volunteers to scour their fields over a few weekends in May to collect the wild eggs. Over the past 15 years, they've brought more than 30,000 eggs to the local wild bird hatchery.

This year, because of the drought, the vetch is shorter, so there are only a few eggs to save -- not enough to need volunteers. Still, the Lundberg family thinks each duck egg counts. So they're salvaging the eggs on their own.

The technique is simple: While one employee drives a tractor, Bryce and his 18-year-old son ride out front on four-wheel ATV's. The idea is to flush out the mother ducks sitting on the nests and collect the eggs before the tractor blades gets there.

As they drive through the fields, a mother duck flies out of the grasses. The three men stop their vehicles and begin searching for the nest. With their eyes down, they push the thick grasses aside, searching for duck eggs.

After 15 minutes of searching, longtime employee Tim Casaulong calls to the others. He has found the nest. Slowly, he picks up three light-blue duck eggs and gently places them in a cardboard egg carton.

Looking down at the eggs, Casaulong -- a big man who drives an even bigger tractor -- shows his soft side:

"Inside that egg, it starts with a little tiny heart and little tiny veins going to the inner lining of the egg. That's the embryo, and it just grows and grows and eventually it turns into a little duck in there... And it's amazing. It's life. It's amazing how it happens."

The Lundberg family has been farming for four generations. The local cafe in their small town of Richvale serves as a mini-museum of their evolution. Back in the 1930s, Albert Lundberg was farming wheat and corn in Nebraska. But eradicating the wild grasses and then over-farming the land led to deep erosion that helped contribute to the Dust Bowl crisis.

Homer Lundberg says his father sold what was left of his farm in Nebraska and moved to California's Sacramento River Valley with his wife and four sons, with an eye to sustaining the land. "He said 'We're going to leave this ground better than we found it. It's not going to be mining the soil, it's going to be building it up and improving it.'"

Albert Lundberg started by rotating crops -- he let the fields go fallow every other year to replenish the soil's nutrients, and used cover crops in the off season. "I guess he was an ecologist before people were even using the word, and we got that spirit," Homer Lundberg says.

Homer's older brother Harlan says he thinks the way his family is farming is the best way to farm. "I don't think what the ordinary farmer is doing can be long-term, because pretty soon the ground won't produce anymore. It'll just be poison."

Harlan Lundberg says it's all about protecting the best land for farming. "We've got to stop paving over our food-producing land. We just got to. Talk about short-sighted. If you want sustainability, you protect the land that grows our food -- end of sermon."

• Music Bridge:

  I Kissed the Dirt + She Kissed Her Bobtail

  Artist: Guitar

  CD: Dealin With Signal And Noise

• What's Your Weekend Soundtrack?

  Maybe it was the backdrop to your greatest day ever. Maybe it's a song that brings you to tears. In the soundtrack to your life, what song is playing when the weekend comes around?

  Tell us about it.

Sponsorship

Download Weekend America

• Subscribe to the enhanced podcast

  

  Skip back-and-forth through stories, see images on iTunes and on your iPod -- all with better sound quality.

Sponsorship