Monday September 21, 2026
The Sacramento Bee —
The road into Dos Rios Norte crosses a bridge. It’s a small one-lane hop over the creek, and then the land opens up.
This is the part Bryce Lundberg mentions first. Not the shear size, or the price, or the wildlife, not even the spring floodwaters. The bridge. “You go across that bridge, and you go out there and say, ‘wow,’” he said. “It’s like you’re in a different world.”
On the other side is 1,600 acres of forest-ringed rice field, set at the confluence of the Feather River and Sacramento River, with Butte Creek sliding in from the north. Rice is a crop that needs flooding, and the Lundbergs — of the locally owned Lundberg Family Farm brand — have grown it here for generations. Engines roar in all directions, powering pumps along the rivers that pull water into the field on a hot August day.
Walk the field this time of year, and barren patches are visible — spots where nothing has grown and the rice has died or gone missing. These spots are still damp, even when the rest of the Central Valley is drying up. The rivers took these low spots for themselves in the spring, and did not give them back in time to plant.