2023 a Great Year for Canada’s Wild Rice Production

An airboat harvesting wild rice in northern Saskatchewan during the 2023 harvest. Courtesy of Origins Wild Rice Co.

It’s been a banner year for wild rice production in northern Saskatchewan, which produces the bulk of Canada’s wild rice crop.

“It’s one of our better years,” said Rusty Cameron, president of the Saskatchewan Wild Rice Council, who has a company called Rusty’s Wild Rice. He said that while the province usually produces around 1.5 million pounds of rice, this year was an exception.

This year, it’s about “3 million [pounds]. It really just excelled up into the north,” he told The Epoch Times.

That view is also shared by Richard Atkins, who is with Wild Man Ricing, a family business in northern Manitoba. He said rice production was damaged by high water levels in the last few years, but this year was almost ideal.

“This year, we had an early spring, a very nice warm sunny June, and low water” compared to previous years, Mr. Atkins said in an interview. “This year we had a 90,000-pound year [of rice production]. Almost three times [the average].”

You may have seen wild rice for sale in grocery stores or in fancy dishes in restaurants but aren’t sure what it is, or why some people get excited about it.

The long brown kernels look like a bigger version of regular rice—but it’s actually a grain. Wild rice is native to the Great Lakes region of North America and is the only cereal crop native to North America, according to La Ronge Wild Rice Corporation. It has been harvested by indigenous people for centuries and was introduced to Saskatchewan in the 1930s. Growing it commercially took off in the late 1970s.

It’s a grassy-looking plant that grows in shallow lakes or slow-moving rivers. It has a nutty flavour and is considered quite nutritious.

“Wild rice is a superfood,” said Lynne Watt, who with her husband runs Origins Wild Rice Co., based in La Ronge, Saskatchewan. “It is a great source of plant-based protein, approximately 14 percent, and it is a complex carbohydrate, making it a very healthy food alternative to replace starchy carbs,” she told The Epoch Times.

“It’s a good, high-quality health food,” added Dale Risula, an expert on specialty crops with Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Agriculture. “There’s a form of starch in there that is a resistant starch, … so it’s good for people who might be prone to spikes in their blood sugar level.”

It is produced under natural conditions—there’s no fertilizer or chemicals used to grow it. And it reseeds itself naturally, so once a stand of wild rice is growing, the main work is the fall harvest.

Organic, wild rice from northern Canada is sold in much of the world, including Asia, the United States, and Europe—and in Canada. It’s often marketed as an organic delicacy.

The Canadian wild rice market is small compared to most agricultural products, and industry estimates project exports to be about $5 million per year worldwide, depending on the size of the harvest. Producers often get somewhere around $2 a pound. By comparison, conventional grains like wheat bring in billions.

But wild rice provides some income and employment in northern regions, where jobs and industries can be hard to find.

“It does create some economic growth … some cash flow in the north, that’s for sure,” said Mr. Atkins. “It was originally brought into the north for that resource to stimulate some economic growth and some stable economic situation.”

Northern Saskatchewan is the largest producer, but wild rice is also produced in northern Manitoba and Ontario. There are several hundred individual producers scattered throughout the north.

Lynne Watt bought the La Ronge-based operation in 2018 with her husband. Harvest time is the busiest time, she said, with lots of family coming out to help, much like family farms.

“Our harvest team consists mainly of extended family that come to northern Saskatchewan for four to six weeks to help with our harvest,” Ms. Watt said. “At any given time, we will have a set of parents, a couple of siblings, nephews, and our own daughters on hand to help wherever needed during the harvest.”

Mr. Cameron estimates several thousand people are hired across the province to help with harvest, although it’s only seasonal.

In the old days, harvesting was often done with canoes, knocking kernels of rice into the boat. These days, it’s done with airboat harvesters.

The boats are driven through the shallow stands of rice, and the rice is knocked into a big scoop at the front, called a “header,” which looks a bit like the front of a prairie combine. Usually several passes are made through a stand of rice over the harvest season to get most of the rice.

“They’re able to harvest it over three or four outings with their airboats to get the rice as it matures, even up to five times,” said Mr. Risula.

After that, the “green” rice needs to be processed. Many growers get their rice processed at La Ronge Wild Rice Corporation, the largest processing plant in the province, which operates in partnership with the Meadow Lake Tribal Council.

After processing, it’s bagged and sold in various countries around the world. One of the selling points is its purity.

“That’s what the growers pride themselves in, that they’re selling that natural, organic product,” said Mr. Risula. “It’s grown in pristine conditions, and I think that’s quite favourable to the marketplace. … It’s quite a delicacy. A lot of people like it.”

With the 2023 harvest all done, another crop will begin to be sold and end up on store shelves or restaurants around much of the world. And growers hope the delicacy from northern Canada will gain more fans with every bite.