1.15 - Rotating rice with Sara Rosenberg (Pt. 1)

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Together, the UCCE Farm Advisors seek to provide relevant, topical research-backed information relating to CA rice production.

In this two-part episode, Sarah Marsh sits down with Dr. Sara Rosenberg, who is currently the UCCE Regenerative Agriculture Farm Advisor for Mariposa, Merced, and Stanislaus Counties to talk about her work in rice crop rotation systems. Sara worked with rice growers in her graduate school experience at UC Davis, where one of her focuses was to understand the barriers to adoption, opportunities, and required resources for successful implementation of crop rotation in rice systems. 

Upcoming Rice Events
Rice Winter Grower Meetings - February 10-13th, 2025 

Rice Crop Rotation Tools
Rice Crop Rotation Calculator
Publications on Rice Crop Rotation

Resources and Links from Sara Rosenberg
Regenerative Agriculture Information and Listening Session
Part 1: Nut Tree Orchards of Central Valley: Future Directions - December 16, 2024
Regenerative Agriculture information

Other Resources

UC Rice Blog

UC Agronomy - Rice

Rice Briefs (Colusa/Yolo)

Rice Notes (Yuba-Sutter)

Rice Leaf (Butte/Glenn)

Rice in the Delta

UC ANR is an equal opportunity provider and employer

Chapters

• 0:00 Podcast Introduction
• 1:09 Introducing Sara Rosenberg
• 6:43 Rationale behind investigating rice crop rotation in California
• 14:05 Key factors affecting crop rotation adoption
• 22:52 Rice Rotation Calculator
• 30:44 Upcoming Events - 2025 Winter Grower Meetings
• 32:13 Available resources and concluding remarks
• 33:31 Disclaimer

Transcript

Transcript

00:00:09 Sarah Marsh Janish

Hello and welcome to Thoughts on Rice, a podcast hosted by the University of California Cooperative Extension Rice Advisors. I'm one of your hosts, Sarah Marsh Janish And I'm a rice farm advisor for Colusa and Yolo counties.

00:00:23 Whitney Brim-Deforest

I'm Whitney Brim-Deforest. I'm the Cooperative Extension Rice advisor for Sutter, Yuba, Placer, and Sacramento counties.

00:00:31 Luis Espino

My name is Luis Espino. I'm the rice farming systems advisor for Butte and Glenn counties.

00:00:38 Michelle Leinfelder-Miles

Michelle Leinfelder-Miles. I'm a farm advisor in the Delta region. I work on all sorts of field crops, grains and forages, but one of those is rice and the counties that I cover are San Joaquin, Sacramento, Yolo, Solano, and Contra Costa counties.

00:00:55 Sarah Marsh Janish

Together, the UCE farm advisors seek to provide relevant topical research backed information relating to California rice production.

00:01:13 Sarah Marsh Janish

Today I had the privilege to sit down with Sara Rosenberg, who is currently the UCE regenerative Agriculture farm advisor for Mariposa, Merced and Stanislaus counties.

00:01:24 Sarah Marsh Janish

Now, there's not a lot of rights in those areas, but Sara spent quite a bit of time working with rice growers in her Graduate School experience at UC Davis, where one of her focuses was to understand the barriers to adoption opportunities and required resources for successful implementation of crop rotation and rice systems. I've asked her here today to talk about some of that past work and rice crop rotation systems.

00:02:07 Sarah Marsh Janish

Hi Sara, how are you?

00:02:09 Sara Rosenberg

How are you? How has everything been?

00:02:12 Sarah Marsh Janish

It's good. I don't know how it is down there, but up here we've been hit by a bit of a deluge and yeah, I know at least the birds, the ground, every everything seems pretty happy and people are OK with it so far.

00:02:25 Sara Rosenberg

Are you talking about the atmospheric river that we're having right now? The bomb cyclone what they're calling?

00:02:31 Sarah Marsh Janish

Yeah, I saw that and I was doing some reading and from, I mean, I'm not an atmospheric scientist, but from the sound of it, it sounds a bit like a hurricane.

00:02:44 Sara Rosenberg

Not, yeah, but yeah, it just seems like a huge drop in in pressure and.

00:02:50 Sara Rosenberg

Like just a dump of rain that's going to happen all of a sudden, just at the peak of it, yeah.

00:02:58 Sara Rosenberg

But that'll be interesting. I think we're more on the tail end of it, over here. So I don't think we're going to see nearly as much as you guys, but.

00:03:06 Sarah Marsh Janish

Has it been raining though? 

00:03:12 Sara Rosenberg

No, not yet. Yesterday was warm and sunny. But this weekend, supposed to be pretty bad, so I think we're going to get it just hasn't hit us yet.

00:03:17 Sarah Marsh Janish

Well, I can tell you for up here, I mean it's been, it's been great for a few days and it's I can tell that people are starting to get a little bit of cabin fever already because I've had a lot of, I've had a lot of very long calls from some very bored growers.

00:03:27 Sara Rosenberg

Yeah.

00:03:32 Sarah Marsh Janish

Which I love. But it's it's interesting to see the shift between in season phone calls and offseason phone calls.

00:03:38 Sara Rosenberg

Yeah, that's funny.

00:03:41 Sarah Marsh Janish

So Sarah, thanks for making the time to be here. Can you tell me a little bit about your background and your education and kind of what led you to this point in your career?

00:03:50 Sara Rosenberg

Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you for having me on your show today. I would say that like background was actually more driven towards international agriculture and it was very serendipitous that I ended up working more locally in California agriculture.

00:04:09 Sara Rosenberg

I worked in West Africa for over 3 1/2 years starting in the Peace Corps, and I spent a lot of time in smallholder farming system.

00:04:23 Sara Rosenberg

And a lot of that looks like just working with smallholder farmers to adapt some more of these kind of conservation agriculture practices like cover cropping, minimal tillage, diversification to the to their context. It really drove my interest and wanting to deepen my understanding and some of the mechanisms and processes that were happening below the ground and above the ground when doing these practices and it's kind of what directed me to come back to grad school at UC Davis, I also worked on a number of farms before and in between that for many years. And then I had my own small diversified farm for a few years, a couple years, and then that, you know, left my Graduate School.

00:05:13 Sara Rosenberg

I ended up working in Rice and I came into UC Davis expecting to come back to West Africa and of course, COVID era happened and so many peoples plans got shifted and I ended up working on this project looking at how crop rotations affect some of these sustainability factors in their system.

00:05:39 Sara Rosenberg

And I knew nothing about Rice actually coming into it, so it was exciting for me to come into this new cropping system, feel like that background of working with farmers in West Africa and being able to bring that to my grad school experience. And then my grad school experience in working with California. The allowed me to come into the Cooperative Extension world and be where I am today.

00:06:04 Sarah Marsh Janish

I'm really glad that you brought up your small farm that you and another colleague kind of ran together when you were in grad school because most people in grad school they find enough to keep themselves busy with the coursework and their projects. But you said, oh, I'm going to take on Yet another pretty intensive project, so that's really, really cool.

00:06:25 Sara Rosenberg

I wouldn't recommend it.

00:06:30 Sara Rosenberg

It was a lot.

00:06:32 Sarah Marsh Janish

So for those who are interested in going to grad school and farming, I I think we can hear it here. First, it it might be a a bit a bit of a challenge, shall we say, to balance.

00:06:42 Sara Rosenberg

Yeah.

00:06:43 Sarah Marsh Janish

So let's move on and talk about crop rotation. And so you've kind of touched on this, but a few years ago when you were doing your grad school work, you and your other colleagues, some of whom have actually been on the podcast before Whitney Brim- Deforest and Michelle Leinfelder-Miles undertook a comprehensive review of crop rotation in rice systems in California, and so for people who aren't really aware, crop rotation in rice systems in California, it's it's not terribly common. At least nowadays it's there's a lot of different reasons as to why that might be, and I'm going to ask you to touch on that later.

00:07:21 Sarah Marsh Janish

But can you just tell me what the rationale was behind looking at crop rotation in California rice systems?

00:07:28 Sara Rosenberg

Sure. Yeah. And I'll just mention.

00:07:31 Sara Rosenberg

This was such a collaborative project, we had pretty much all of the major rice phone advisors. My Pi at UC Davis, Cameron pilko. We're all involved in this work from the inception and.

00:07:48 Sara Rosenberg

I think.

00:07:49 Sara Rosenberg

The rationale really stemmed from an IBM perspective right thinking about utilizing these cultural practices for weeds and herbicide resistance issues, which we know is such a huge issue for California rice sector. And there's a lot of.

00:08:11 Sara Rosenberg

I got promotion of crop rotation for those efforts. But like you said, there's not a lot of actual implementation and so there's certainly was a ton of anecdotal remarks about why growers are not rotating the price, but we really.

00:08:31 Sara Rosenberg

Didn't really know beyond that from the first hand experience of growers, what the rationale was for not rotating. And so that's kind of what drove us into this.

00:08:41 Sara Rosenberg

This work and then the baseline assessment that you introduced, but the the rationale behind starting out was yeah, I mean where rotation should be performed to support some of these issues around IPM and and weed management. The other thing that came into play though was also this side of the narrative around water scarcity events that were starting to come into.

00:09:03 Sara Rosenberg

Play more and more in California and and I was working with this crop rotation research in 22 when we saw that huge water scarcity events and you know over 50% of price acreage was fallowed that year in the Sacramento Valley and.

00:09:19 Sara Rosenberg

So it became.

00:09:21 Sara Rosenberg

Kind of this conversational piece of.

00:09:24 Sara Rosenberg

Doing this work, realizing that you know this is another motivation factor for for really investigating some of the impacts of rotations of having it be another tool for growers to use in times of drought when there might not be enough water to grow rice, but there could be water to grow other crops.

00:09:43 Sarah Marsh Janish

I was actually talking to a grower yesterday and he told me that he ended up fouling his ground in 22 and in 23 he actually decided to plant a rotational crop instead in that same rice ground and one of the reasons behind him actually deciding to switch up was because of some of this work. He directly cited this work that you guys had put out as a reason to look into alternative croppings. So I I thought that was.

00:10:14 Sarah Marsh Janish

Really, really impressive.

00:10:16 Sara Rosenberg

I love that you have had that experience and it makes me so happy to hear just because I think a lot of times we do this work and we don't really see the impact of it very. You know as much as we would like so.

00:10:32 Sara Rosenberg

That's really exciting.

00:10:33 Sarah Marsh Janish

So can you tell me a bit about the methodology behind your work on crop rotation? And so I I think we just want to kind of touch on the baseline assessment the the first ground work that you all did to kind of investigate more about crop rotations in rice system, so we could start there.

00:10:51 Sara Rosenberg

Sure. Actually it's it's interesting that like kind of taking a step back to your original question of how I got here, a lot of the conversations around bringing in grower perspectives, doing these semi structured interviews, they're not common in Economic Research and.

00:11:12 Sara Rosenberg

I had been discussing.

00:11:15 Sara Rosenberg

Uh, I have been discussing with my Pi at the time at UC Davis. I really wanted to engage in more participatory methods of research, and at that time in the context of going back to gonna actually. And so we would have these discussions around how do we integrate.

00:11:35 Sara Rosenberg

Grower perspectives. How do we get their experiences and use that as data to perhaps inform our research better and?

00:11:47 Sara Rosenberg

We had devised some of that methodology to use in West Africa, but because I never got to go back to West Africa, we ended up using it here. And So what what we did was I had the privilege of basically designing a baseline assessment.

00:12:09 Sara Rosenberg

It's kind of comparable for a lot of extension work where you need to kind of do a needs assessment essentially or an asset assessment of the communities of people that you are working with and the whole baseline assessment was to inform future research goals.

00:12:29 Sara Rosenberg

Right. So we I conducted interviews with like 42 rice growers. I think about the Sacramento Valley, half of them rotated, half of them. Didn't some of them were organic. Most of them were conventional, but it was.

00:12:46 Sara Rosenberg

Form of really learning from their perspective, what what their experiences were and learning about some of the benefits that they experienced with crop rotations. If they did rotate some of the concerns and barriers to adoption, if they didn't, and then through all of that.

00:13:06 Sara Rosenberg

Kind of come to an understanding of, well, what are the requirements for rotations to be successful so that.

00:13:13 Sara Rosenberg

Was really insightful, but I think the key point that came out of that which which which really drove the next phases of the research was taking the results back to some of the participants that were involved in the research and some other stakeholders and presenting the outcomes.

00:13:34 Sara Rosenberg

Back to them and then opening up more of a multi stakeholder conversation.

00:13:40 Sara Rosenberg

Well, where do we go from here? What are some knowledge gaps? What? What further information would you like to know about crop rotations with rice and having that baseline assessment inform some of those decisions? So out of that baseline assessment came all this other work around economics and crop rotation soil.

00:14:00 Sara Rosenberg

Health and some of the other stuff that we may get into or not.

00:14:04 Sarah Marsh Janish

So when you brought this information back to the growers, what did you find? Were some of the key factors influencing the adoption of crop rotation in those fields?

00:14:16 Sara Rosenberg

The interview has really highlighted a number of major barriers in terms of what what limits growers ability to rotate with other crops and rice and the number one that came out of the rotation or the interviews was really.

00:14:36 Sara Rosenberg

The environments that they they weren't working in.

00:14:39 Sara Rosenberg

That particularly means the soil.

00:14:41 Sara Rosenberg

Right. And we know that California rice soils are really high in clay, not just being high in clay, but certain types of clay, right? There's these really known clays that are just, we call them one to one clays. Generally, the way that the clay soils support rice is that.

00:15:02 Sara Rosenberg

Water. You know we can flood these soils really easily and it allows for rice to to grow there because rice tolerates flooded environments, but other crops don't.

00:15:12 Sara Rosenberg

So, so so the the clay factor was a really big barrier. The other things involved there was flooded floodplains. So if growers were located in floodplains, usually a combination of factors of being in a floodplain having high clay soils.

00:15:32 Sara Rosenberg

Were having some type of shallow soil that had a heart pan underneath. It would limit their ability to successfully grow other crops, right? Maybe they could grow other crops, but that the the success of those crops are going to be quite minimal relative to the success they're getting out of, of growing a rice.

00:15:51 Sara Rosenberg

The second thing that came out of that was the requirements.

00:15:55 Sara Rosenberg

For rotating with other crops, oftentimes rice is, you know, we we have a few, a large tractor, a few implements for fuel prep and then.

00:16:09 Sara Rosenberg

Rice is seeded by airplane, right? Unless you're in the delta, then the IT is direct seated, but in the Sacramento Valley.

00:16:18 Sara Rosenberg

Dominantly seated by airplane so the the mere fact of not having the correct equipment to grow other crops, right. Not having the tractors, the smaller tractors that are needed for growing low crops, huge limitation. And the other part.

00:16:38 Sara Rosenberg

That is accompanied with that is the entire infrastructure for rice in the Sacramento Valley was really built for rice. So you're growing on these really leveled fields with levies, the infrastructure for irrigation is.

00:16:52 Sara Rosenberg

Flooded so we don't have easy systems, just like it's not really easy to switch over to a sub irrigation a system or you know for our irrigation even is is a little bit challenging. So all of the.

00:17:11 Sara Rosenberg

Factors that have been kind of put into place to make rice feasible and easy makes growing other crops infeasible and very challenging.

00:17:23 Sara Rosenberg

So on the other side, you could flip that over and you could say, well, those are technically having.

00:17:29 Sara Rosenberg

Those are the requirements for successful rock crop rotation and talking with growers that were rotating.

00:17:37 Sara Rosenberg

And have been rotating for years. They tend to have all those resources and whether that's because it's just, you know, it's been in their family for generations, or that's just how they started out their operations they have.

00:17:54 Sara Rosenberg

The correct equipment they have, perhaps more, you know, versatile soil, so less constraints on the soil.

00:18:03 Sara Rosenberg

And.

00:18:04 Sara Rosenberg

They also I will put in these other layers where they have developed contracts, markets and more of the the social networking into these markets for them to sell.

00:18:19 Sara Rosenberg

The rotation crops, which should oftentimes missing in kind of these rice only regions.

00:18:25 Sara Rosenberg

Yeah. So I think there's there's a lot of different factors involved. I would say one thing too that was highlighted in my work, which is you know, the environment was the major constraint.

00:18:38 Sara Rosenberg

And oftentimes this was seen with growers who had both types of operations, right. If they had fields that were some of the fields that they rotated in and then they had some fields that were always continuously rice fields and the major decision making criteria there was well.

00:18:58 Sara Rosenberg

You know these fields don't grow row crops very well and these fields.

00:19:02 Sara Rosenberg

However, there were certain growers that they did practice rotation on fields that may be considered more very specific, and having all of the other resources really allowed them to overcome those environmental limitations.

00:19:22 Sara Rosenberg

So those those are some I think some really important factors that came.

00:19:26 Sara Rosenberg

Out of that.

00:19:27 Sarah Marsh Janish

Work well. Speaking of available resources, something that also comes to mind, at least anecdotally, is I know there might be a lack of available information about crop rotation in rice. Did you find that that was also?

00:19:42 Sarah Marsh Janish

A factor that was kind of a barrier towards rice crop rotation.

00:19:47 Sara Rosenberg

In a way and and I.

00:19:49 Sara Rosenberg

Guess.

00:19:50 Sara Rosenberg

What relates to that was this social networking and social asset piece that came into play where rotations are occurring in the Sacramento Valley.

00:20:00 Sara Rosenberg

Tend to be in more diversified landscapes generally, and so the in the South and the Sutter area, certain parts of Sutter and Colusa where rotations are more popular. Growers are kind of surrounded by diversified cropping systems, so there is more options.

00:20:20 Sara Rosenberg

For social networking in those regions, there's more information in terms of.

00:20:27 Sara Rosenberg

Finding markets in those regions.

00:20:30 Sara Rosenberg

And there's definitely more farmer to farmer.

00:20:34 Sara Rosenberg

Communication efforts for people to lean on if there's certain.

00:20:38 Sara Rosenberg

Knowledge graphs of.

00:20:39 Sara Rosenberg

Any kind and the other side of it in these really dominant rice growing regions, the culture is is really, really heavy.

00:20:47 Sara Rosenberg

Focus on on rice production and that really digs into how you know the the identities of these growers were.

00:20:55 Sara Rosenberg

And.

00:20:56 Sara Rosenberg

And the culture that they're coming from was a really important factor that played.

00:20:59 Sarah Marsh Janish

A role in it among the rice goers who adopted crop rotation. What were some of the most common rotations that you saw in your surveys?

00:21:07 Sara Rosenberg

What I really enjoyed learning about for this work is how diverse peoples rotations were.

00:21:14 Sara Rosenberg

And the sequences were super flexible, so growers were very much adapting their rotations based on market sway based on the shifts in the markets based on their their weather and their labor demands.

00:21:29 Sara Rosenberg

And what I found to be.

00:21:31 Sara Rosenberg

The dominant was the summer rope, crop rotations and a lot of that was using things like tomato.

00:21:40 Sara Rosenberg

Sunflower, which I know is I think, has been removed from practice in the Sacramento Valley at this point.

00:21:48 Sarah Marsh Janish

Yeah, most. Most of it's been phased out now.

00:21:52 Sara Rosenberg

So that was there when I was doing this work.

00:21:56 Sara Rosenberg

Which is too bad that that is taken out because it came up out as a really good option for growers. But Sunflower tomato, some of them were rotating with beans and soft flour. Leet was in there as well. And then there were some of these other combinations of cool.

00:22:16 Sara Rosenberg

Season crops and forage crops in a lot of that was more around areas that had more livestock operations in the region. So alfalfa beats again.

00:22:29 Sara Rosenberg

By garbanzo beans. Those were some of the cool season beans, things like that that were integrated.

00:22:36 Sara Rosenberg

So it was.

00:22:37 Sara Rosenberg

Really, really diverse. And it was definitely like every every grower had a different sequence and a different different factors that led them to pick and choose which which.

00:22:50 Sara Rosenberg

Drops they were rotating.

00:22:51 Sarah Marsh Janish

With, if you could touch on the race rotation calculator, which was one of the outcomes of your project.

00:22:59 Sara Rosenberg

Yes, one of the outcomes of the interviews.

00:23:03 Sara Rosenberg

Was that?

00:23:05 Sara Rosenberg

Those who rotated suggested that economics was a driving factor for rotation, meaning it was profitable and those who did not rotate said economics was a leading barrier for why they did not rotate, meaning it was not profitable. And so having these two separate views was a huge kind of focus point.

00:23:26 Sara Rosenberg

That came out of this work.

00:23:28 Sara Rosenberg

And it became very clear that while we need to further investigate some of the economic outcomes of crop rotation in order to better understand.

00:23:40 Sara Rosenberg

How they are both. Maybe you know how how these both of these perceptions are coming out and how they're so opposing from one another. So I having you know, not much economics background dove into this huge undertaking and trying to understand.

00:24:01 Sara Rosenberg

The profitability of crop rotations with rice.

00:24:05 Sara Rosenberg

And we have a whole lot of data in California in terms of cost of production studies on different crops grown in California. But those are all very much like a snapshot of that one crop. And so it doesn't really.

00:24:24 Sara Rosenberg

Give any information from the rice perspective of what it costs to transition.

00:24:34 Sara Rosenberg

Out of rice into a rotation crop and discussing with growers in the in the interviews, you know it, it came about as a lot of the challenges were like I said, with these resources, the infrastructure for irrigation and they're not having that set up. And so of course when you look at it from an economic perspective.

00:24:54 Sara Rosenberg

There's costs associated with all those things. There's extra costs associated with transitioning to a subsurface drip irrigation with transitioning to extra bed prep. If you're going to build build beds for transplanting with extra labor requirements for doing this.

00:25:12 Sara Rosenberg

Labor work. And so we really wanted to ask the question, what are the costs associated with all these extra requirements and how does that affect profitability when rice growers transitioning?

00:25:26 Sara Rosenberg

Out of a continuous rise operation into rotational operation and so you know we we held some really successful focus groups with growers to gain some data on the costs that they experienced with some of these things.

00:25:44 Sara Rosenberg

And then we went and went into the cost of production studies specifically for these rotation crops like tomatoes, sunflower, sunflower and beans, and basically did this, you know, accounting sheets where we.

00:26:00 Sara Rosenberg

Put down all of the inputs and then looked at profit and.

00:26:06 Sara Rosenberg

While that was really interesting, what I wanted was to I wanted to be able to have an output that was like a decision support tool for growers to use.

00:26:16 Sarah Marsh Janish

Something practical, yeah.

00:26:18 Sara Rosenberg

Something practical and I have been inspired from another past, UC Davis, a student who had done something similar with cover cropping in almonds and tomatoes, and there was a cover crop cost, decision support tool that was put together online.

00:26:38 Sara Rosenberg

So I used that model and in collaboration with Western IPM and Whitney Brown, Deforest and.

00:26:44 Sara Rosenberg

And you know others. We had this crop rotation decision support tool developed and basically growers can go online, they can pick which crop they're interested in. They have a framework where all of these cost components are already set up.

00:27:05 Sara Rosenberg

And there's like an average of that's selected based on the research this average cost.

00:27:12 Sara Rosenberg

Put into place, but they have the opportunity to change that cost based on their own context or their own knowledge and or mess with that cost to see how it might change outcomes.

00:27:25 Sara Rosenberg

And so it basically pops out kind of a, you know, a net loss or a net profit if they were interested in switching over a caveat here is that the decision support tool is a short term outcome tool, right? And so thinking about how things profitable profitability wise change over time.

00:27:46 Sara Rosenberg

This tool doesn't cap.

00:27:47 Sara Rosenberg

To that, but it is a is really great beginning space for goers to go in and and kind of explore the complexity of rotation and how that might translate into profit or loss for.

00:27:57 Sarah Marsh Janish

Them I am. I'm glad you noted that caveat because I I think a lot of research out there regarding crop rotation and cover crops in conjunction.

00:28:08 Sarah Marsh Janish

Notes that it takes a long time to see the long term effects of some of these systems, so that's I think something to keep in mind for people who are using this tool that it's not capturing the entire picture.

00:28:20 Sara Rosenberg

Yeah, and and actually what it shows you is basically you're one right, if you're doing all this investment, all the investment cost, what a, what a year one cost looks like and then it gives you a quote UN quote average year. So that does not include some of these investment costs that overtime may may be reduced.

00:28:40 Sara Rosenberg

And what else? It doesn't.

00:28:41 Sara Rosenberg

Provide you which we we did look at in some modeling was the impact of some of the benefits rotations provide. So if for example you're coming back into rice after rotating out for three or so many years, you may expect to see us.

00:29:02 Sara Rosenberg

A boost in yields and that was not represented in this calculator. You may also experience a reduction in needs, perhaps a reduction in input.

00:29:13 Sara Rosenberg

And so that also wasn't captured in this. And so in some of the modeling that we did, we did do economic long term studies over a period of 15 years with some common quote UN quote common sequences of rotation. And those benefits had a huge impact on profit.

00:29:32 Sara Rosenberg

And so it is really this combination of.

00:29:36 Sara Rosenberg

Experiencing those benefits as well as the high revenue crops like tomato and, you know, rice is a high revenue crop relatively.

00:29:45 Sara Rosenberg

But it was really a combination of using these high revenue rotation crops and having these rotational benefits that allow profit to be realized for a rice grower, you know, compared to a continuous rice grower.

00:30:02 Sarah Marsh Janish

Hi everyone. This is Sarah Marsh Janish here. Sara Rosenberg and I had such a good chat about crop rotation.

00:30:10 Sarah Marsh Janish

That we actually ended up going overtime, so I decided to split this episode into two parts. The next part will be released next week, so don't fear you'll be able to hear more from Sara Rosenberg this time on cover crops in next week's episode. So please come back next week to hear the rest of this conversation.

00:30:46 Sarah Marsh Janish

We have announced the dates for the 2025 Winter rice grower meetings and so we're going to continue the same format we've had in previous years having a series of repeating meetings across the rice growing region. So it's OK. In fact it's suggested don't go to all of them, you'll.

00:31:02 Sarah Marsh Janish

Be pretty bored, but.

00:31:04 Sarah Marsh Janish

Try to make at least one of them the same information will be presented at all of them.

00:31:08 Sarah Marsh Janish

And so I'm going to read off this list of dates, but please keep in mind these dates are on our blogs, on our websites and our newsletters. So anywhere you need to get more information, go ahead and.

00:31:19 Sarah Marsh Janish

Look for that.

00:31:20 Sarah Marsh Janish

Without further ado, here are the dates and area locations for the 2025 rice winter.

00:31:28 Sarah Marsh Janish

For meetings, the specific locations are currently TBD, but here's just the general town they'll be in, so you can kind of play in your early spring.

00:31:38 Sarah Marsh Janish

February 10th in the morning will be the woodland meeting.

00:31:43 Sarah Marsh Janish

February 12th in the morning will be the RICHVALE meeting, February 12th in the afternoon will be the Willows meeting.

00:31:51 Sarah Marsh Janish

February 13th in the morning will be the Colusa meeting, and finally February 13th in the afternoon will be the Yuba City meeting again. Those specific locations are TBD. They will be in those towns, but we will have more information later on and we will be sure to get that out to all of you as soon as we have that.

00:32:12 Sarah Marsh Janish

Accessible.

00:32:13 Sarah Marsh Janish

To learn more about the UCCE race program, please feel free to look at our resources, which include the UC Rice blog, the UC agronomy Rice website, and our newsletters, which are rice briefs which covers Colusa, Yolo Rice notes, which covers you with Sutter Rice Leaf, which covers Butte and Glenn.

00:32:35 Sarah Marsh Janish

And field notes, which covers rice in the delta region. Thanks for listening to thoughts on rice. The University of California Cooperative Extension Podcast from the University California Agriculture, Natural resources. You can find out more about this podcast on our website. Thoughts on rice.buzzsprout.com. We'd love to hear from.

00:32:55 Sarah Marsh Janish

You.

00:32:56 Sarah Marsh Janish

Whether it's from using our text link in the show notes.

00:32:59 Sarah Marsh Janish

A survey submission and our feedback form also in the show notes or in a comment or rating on your podcast streaming service of choice. You can comment or rate on any service. We will get it and we would be interested in it. You can also e-mail us with any comments, questions or concerns. Thoughts on rice at UC Davis.

00:33:18 Sarah Marsh Janish

Dot Edu.

00:33:20 Sarah Marsh Janish

Hopefully everybody gets to breathe a little bit now that harvest is done and remember, like the growers like to say, have a nice life.

00:33:29 Sarah Marsh Janish

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00:33:51 Sarah Marsh Janish

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