Fall River Wild Rice 41577 Osprey Drive Fall River Mills, CA 96028 Tel: (530)336-5222  Fax: (530)336-5265 info@frwr.com http://www.frwr.com Gail Lennon Wild Rice Grower brokfarm@hdo.net

Welcome to Wild Rice Country! Located in a rural mountain valley, nestled between the Cascade and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges, is the Fall River Valley, home to Fall River Wild Rice, a small grower owned cooperative.  The fertile soils, clean air, spring waters and crisp climate of this high mountain valley offer ideal growing conditions for the natural cultivation of this native North American grain.   Also known as the California Wild Rice Growers Association, the Cooperative was initially formed in 1986 as a means to market wild rice.  Upon the realization that finished wild rice was the only way to guarantee a consistent price to the grower, the Cooperative built a processing plant at it's current location in Fall River Mills, California.  Today Fall River Wild Rice is a major player in the wild rice industry.  Catering to industrial, foodservice, and retail markets around the world.

Meet one of our wild rice growers, Gail Lennon.  Gail is a pioneer of the wild rice growers.  She's been with us from the beginning.  From that First Season in 1984, through the Production Boom of 1986, the Water Shortage of the early 90's and all the way to the Power Crisis of 2001!!

	Gail Lennon I have been producing wild rice since it was introduced to our valley in 1984.  I took part in the initial research and development of this sustainable crop because I believed it was particularly suitable for our own heavy soils, and was fascinated with its history as being the only grain native to our country.  It was called "manoomin", which means "precious grain."  I remember the year after the first crop, when we new growers watched and waited to see if the fields we had harvested would volunteer and be really sustainable.  They did and the yields were even better!
However, the next year was not good for us as we found we were at the mercy of the BIG buyers, with processing facilities.  They knew we had to take any price they offered, as our crop must be harvested green and is highly perishable.  They did not grant us mercy.  Again, we got together and brain stormed.  We wanted to keep the crop in our valley but could not survive with our cost input if we could not control the sales.  A group decision was reached where we would investigate building our own processing plant and thus not be driven to sell only at harvest and at a great disadvantage.  To make a long story short, we formed a cooperative and built a processing plant.   After many mistakes, hard knocks, and leftover inventory, we have learned much about processing our wild rice.  Our wild rice was chosen as the best tasting by the American Tasting Institute two year in a row.  But learning to grow and process our delicious and wonderful native grain has been easy compared to breaking into the retail and wholesale markets.  It is vicious in the marketplace.
I am particularly excited by our new product, Fall River Wild Rice Chips, because not only are the chips absolutely delicious and healthy, they use the part of our production that is harder to sell, the broken and little grains.  Now we grind them up into flour and make chips!  They really taste good and are nutritious too!
In February 1999, the National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC) asked if I would represent them in the SuperMarket project of the Rural Coalition.  Our first meeting was in Epes, AL at the home of the Southern Federation of Cooperatives.  Many diverse organizations attended from all over the nation and from Mexico such as Intertribal Agriculture Council (who control, 79% of of the 54 million acres held in trust for Indian people), Mississippi cooperatives, Hispanic and Hmong cooperatives in California, and many others. The purpose of the SuperMarket project was to cooperatively develop an interactive web site to be used as a marketing, technical assistance and marketing tool, to locate new markets and methods that will result in increased earnings for cooperatives, and to develop a self supporting secondary cooperative. At this meeting we learned about forming cooperatives, types of cooperatives and began our talks on developing a web site, where we could all sell our products.
	Many of us were introduced to computers and we began to learn how we could use them to communicate and of the many potentialities for their use as a tool in our businesses.  We discussed the various products we had and the difficulties we all experienced in marketing. Despite our differences in crops, cultures, and regions, our values are very similar.  We all knew and believed in our products and valued family sized farms where stewardship is part of life.  Most important, we all are willing to work together to achieve our dreams.
At our second meeting, we began to construct web sites and talked about the logistics of marketing.  It was there it dawned on me that I was not only a member of the NFFC but I belonged to a cooperative that had experienced and overcome some of the very issues we were discussing.  I was able to share our web page and some of our experiences in setting up a processing plant and the problems we had run into in our initial marketing attempts.  As a result, Fall River Wild Rice became involved in the Rural Coalition's SuperMarket project. Hiram Oilar, Fall River Wild Rice's general manager, attended our third meeting in St. Louis and shared our experiences on how to identify consumers, what to expect from distributors, and the development of our value added product, Fall River Wild Rice Chips.  The SuperMarket Project has truly become a cooperative of cooperatives. Because of the Rural Coalition, we keep in touch with each other and the learning process has not stopped.  We now can jointly attack and solve problems and have more hope of keeping the family farm alive. We are excited by the opportunity that has been presented to us by the Rural Coalition's new Retail Store.  We who grow healthy food and those that value and enjoy eating healthy and safe food now have a better opportunity to know each other. We family farmers have always known that our customers are most important but now we have the opportunity to know them and to interact.  THIS IS GREAT! I like to think that when a customer opens their box or bag of wild rice or a bag of our chips and sniffs, that they will actually smell the fresh air of our wild and beautiful valleys and almost hear the sounds of the geese and ducks flying overhead. Fall River Wild Rice is on it's way to the successful marketing of our Wild Rice Chips and I believe our involvement with other organizations has been extremely helpful on this two way street.  Our growers are a team and work well together researching and solving problems.  Our main strength is our belief in our product and we don't mind working to spread the word.  Wild rice is an important crop in our area.  Our cooperative provides jobs and fully supports our community businesses.  Our hopes are that we will be able to grow and make a difference to the family farm sector of our nation.