My name is Marty Stites and I'm sales manager for Oregon Jewel Wild Rice. Grown, processed, packaged and marketed right here in Oregon. It's been my good fortune to be associated with two real pioneers in the agricultural business. Richard Bylund and Dave Rogers saw a need for a better way to make a living off the land in the southern Willamette Valley. Not much grows there because the soil is so thick with clay that few crops can take root. But that makes it ideal for growing wild rice because it holds water so well. Most of the water loss in one of our wild rice paddies is through evaporation. Growing wild rice creates man-made wetland areas. A natural wetland is a giant water filtration system, filtering and cooling the water. Paddies act the same way. Water leaving a wild rice paddy is cleaner and colder then when it entered. Non-productive land is made productive and the enviornment benefits in the process. It's an "Oregon" kinda thing do.

What does grow well in the Willamette Valley is grass seed. For a while, Oregon led the world in grass seed production. There's also a lot of wheat and other grains that do well. But that requires the conventional farming approach. Plow, disc, and harrow the land as flat as possible. Strip it of any food and shelter for the native wild life and call it good. When you grow wild rice, you do just the opposite. You create food and shelter. You make it possible to bring back biodiversity to areas that have been laid bare for years. The wild rice paddies act as magnets for plants and animals. The variety is incredible. For instance, there are so many different types of birds hanging out at the paddies that the Audubon Society has put us on their list of birding sites.

Packaging our eight ounce cartons of wild rice is DePaul Industries in Portland, Oregon. Everything is done by hand. They take a lot of pride in what they do and it shows.

Oregon is the low cost provider of wild rice in the United States. Because of our near perfect weather and soil conditions, we can grow more rice for less money then anybody else. And from knowledgable sources we've heard that our finished wild rice is better that anything coming out of California. So with better production and higher quality, my job is a little easier. Right now, my main job is to get the word out to potential customers and growers that there is an Oregon grown wild rice and that there is a market for it. I really believe that we are at the start of a new farming industry here in Oregon.