Wild Rice From Idaho's Lakes

By SUSAN HERRMANN LOOMIS Published N.Y Times: July 19, 1987

Al Bruner dons ear protectors, sunglasses and a baseball cap, steps into his airboat harvester named Heron and roars away. It's August in St. Maries, Idaho, a tiny town just an hour and a half from Spokane, Wash., and the wild rice harvest is on
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The airboat, a metal skiff with a huge V-8 engine and a wooden propeller mounted on the back, a long trough with a high net backing on the front, called a header, is nearly lost to view in the tall, pale green rice plants. A plastic pipe across the header strikes the rice plants, tapping kernels into the trough. Some of the stalks are late bloomers with a few dainty purple and yellow flowers still on them. The flowers will turn into rice kernels within days, then take a few weeks to get fat, green and milky, and Mr. Bruner will return to harvest them.

Harvesting requires intense concentration. The boat is heavy in the back, and driving it is like being in a constant skid. At 12 miles an hour it wouldn't take much to capsize it. And it requires skill to avoid the many huge muskrat houses, the tops of which stick above the water like icebergs.
The airboat's noise doesn't seem to disrupt the blue herons, osprey and kingfishers that build nests nearby and feed on the rice. They take flight, and minutes after the boat has made a swath through the rice, they're back.

Idaho isn't the first place one might look for wild rice. Minnesota, perhaps, or Canada or California. But a company called St. Maries Wild Rice Inc. is transforming marginal Idaho farmland into swampy, rice-producing acreage. And this year it will harvest 100,000 pounds of the toasty, wild grain from 400 acres. That's less than 2 percent of the wild rice produced in the United States. But the Idaho rice is long and plump and classified grade A under industry specifications. Mr. Bruner and Jeffrey Baker, owners of St. Maries Wild Rice, are taking aim at the gourmet market.
St. Maries (pronounced St. Mary's) is a logging town surrounded by lakes and low fir-covered hills with rugged trails into the high country. About six miles out of town on State Route 5 is Heyburn State Park, where the shadowy St. Joe River, proclaimed by a sign nearby as ''the highest navigable river in the world'' (officially defined as a river deep enough to float a six-inch log to market), extends, tree-lined banks and all, far into Benewah and Chatcollet Lakes.

The main street of St. Maries is bordered by dusty-windowed storefronts and taverns that look as if they haven't changed much in the last few decades. The high point of the year comes in August when the town holds a festival called Paul Bunyan Days and residents stage log-rolling contests in the town swimming pool and a parade down Main Street.

The area is popular with sportsmen who hunt ducks and geese on nearby lakes. Elk roam a few miles out of town, and roofs sprout huge elk antlers. Stuffed ducks and polished rifles are common elements of interior design. The area is also popular with bird lovers who come to see one of the largest concentrations of osprey in the country, blue heron, even bald eagles, which winter near St. Maries.
For a while the birds almost disappeared, but they're returning, and the owners of St. Maries Wild Rice like to think that their crop is part of the draw. It's not the entire reason they go to the trouble of flooding fields, inventing harvesting machinery and bucking tradition in a conservative area where regional cuisine runs to deep-fried chicken and long, snaky french fries called curly fries. As Al Bruner put it, ''It's the icing on the cake.''

But thanks to the waterfowl, St. Maries Wild Rice came into being. In the early 50's, some sportsmen imported seed from Minnesota and threw it into Lake Benewah, hoping it would provide feed for the waterfowl. By 1980 the rice, which isn't really rice but an aquatic grass, was choking the lake along with other aquatic weeds. In 1982 when Mr. Bruner and Mr. Baker expressed interest in the rice as a cash crop, the Idaho State Department of Parks and Recreation, which has jurisdiction over the lake, opened the harvest to bids. The bid was awarded to Mr. Bruner and Mr. Baker, provided that they help rid the lake of weeds while harvesting the rice. They developed and built an airboat and invented a Rube Goldbergesque underwater mower for the weeds. Their first harvest netted 6,000 pounds, which they shipped to Minnesota for processing.

Since 1984 St. Maries Wild Rice has had its own processing plant just outside of town. There the rice is cured outdoors for more than a week. Then it is roasted, hulled, cleaned and graded as it passes through a series of jostling machines. Finally it is stored in 100-pound sacks. Much of the rice is packaged in eight-ounce boxes with a stylized blue heron on the front. The rest is sold in bulk in the United States and Canada.

The wild rice enterprise, which employs eight people during peak season, has become a source of local pride. Graydon Brown, owner of Benewah Resort on Lake Benewah, like many others, feels that rice will be the industry of the future. If true, that is good news for a town dependent on an ailing timber industry.