Wednesday December 28, 2022
Spectrum News 1 —
His flooded fields, right now, are not growing anything humans care much for. It is food for salmon.
“Doing these practices during the off season or in the winter time is a great partnership. And goes hand-in-hand with our production,” said Jon Munger, Vice President of Operations at Montna Farms. “We’re flooding our fields here in the winter to decompose our rice straw. So, if we can provide another environmental benefit such as providing fish food and enhance the overall water fowl or shore bird type of habitat we have here, it’s great.”
Researcher Jacob Katz has been studying the benefits rice fields can have for critical salmon populations. His team started by putting baby salmon in cages in rice fields to see how well they would grow.
The team found salmon grew five times larger and stronger than baby salmon in the river, from the naturally occurring food produced in rice fields that doesn’t occur in river systems.