Conservation

Water:

As Mark Twain once said, “in California, whiskey is for drinking and water is for fightin’.”  We consider our water resources the life blood of our operation and take seriously the use and reuse of these supplies.  We care for this precious resource by laser leveling our fields to limit the amount of water used, strategically place water circulation components to reuse supplies, create and maintain natural detention basins to slow, and sometimes limit, water run-off, and utilize modern sprinkler systems.  All these measures help minimize the use and improve the quality of water that we use on our lands.  It also helps charge our groundwater basins by allowing the water to percolate back into the ground for use at a later time.  With an opportunity to invest into a local irrigation company, we decided to get more involved into this vital resource. Being engaged in local and state issues as well as having first hand knowledge of the ever changing water delivery systems gives us the best knowledge of incorporating the most efficient system for each crop. We’ve also partnered with the California Department of Water Resources and Glenn County by installing two groundwater monitoring wells on our property to help with the understanding of this resource.

Air:

Like the rest of California, we’ve taken steps to improve the air we breathe by implementing measures that reduce the amount of pollutants we create. These include tractors and engines with the latest air reducing technologies, state of the art air cleaning systems on our drying and seed cleaning operations, chopping our orchard pruning back into the soil instead of burning (this is also beneficial for soil fertility) and phased out rice straw burning Rice Straw - many years before it was outlawed in California, Larrabee Farms made a conscious decision to stop burning our rice fields.  We did this for many reasons, but the primary one was to find a solution to dealing with the left over straw before we were mandated by law to do so.  This forward thinking lead us to an amazing result – thousands of migrating friends from Canada and beyond looking for a place to rest and feed, they picked through the water and straw increasing the decomposition of our rice straw.  It turned into a huge win-win-win for us, the birds, and the air.  To this day, we’ve been blessed with thousands of ducks, geese, swans, and shore birds returning to visiting our lands every year.

Soil:

Just like air and water, soil is the third component to a healthy and fertile environment.  We accomplish this by limiting the amount of fertilizers applied to crops through variable rate application technology, constantly monitoring soil health and maintaining a proper chemistry make-up of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. We adhere to best management practices. Larrabee Farms is committed to improving the soil fertility of our lands and ensuring they are better than when inherited from our forefathers.