Conservation

Conservation •

CRC and its Conservation Partners Awarded RCPP Grant

CRC and its Conservation Partners Awarded RCPP Grant

We are very pleased to announce that the CRC and our partners have been selected for a nearly $5.5 million Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) Award.  This will continue to fuel our storied legacy of working collaboratively with our many valued conservation partners to enhance waterbird habitat on working ricelands.  

We are excited to pick-up where our previous RCPP left off but while also adding a few new objectives.  We will, of course, keep funding our highly successful practices for shorebirds here in the Valley. However, we also will work to design and deliver an attractive option for growers to plant cover crops that are very beneficial to nesting birds, like our local mallards, which are in decline.  Finally, we’ll roll-out a focused pilot program to restore small non-cropped areas on rice farms to permanent native cover that we hope will begin to help pollinators, pheasants, and other uplands birds to thrive.

Carlos Suarez, NRCS State Conservationist for California, offers his perspective on this latest CRC Award by saying “We are excited to continue our long-tenured partnership with the California Rice Commission and its partners to enhance ricelands waterbird habitat that is so critical to the Pacific Flyway”. 

As with all of our successes, CRC won this RCPP Award in partnership with 14 partners that all care deeply for our wildlife resources in the Sacramento Valley.  This list includes Audubon, California Waterfowl, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, California Ricelands Waterbird Foundation, Central Valley Joint Venture, Delta Waterfowl, Ducks Unlimited, Northern California Water Association, Pheasants Forever, Point Blue Conservation Science, Rice Research Board, The Nature Conservancy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Geological Service.

We appreciate NRCS continuing to partner with the CRC and its partners to help sustain waterbird habitat in the Pacific Flyway.

For questions on overall program development, contact Environmental Affairs Manager Paul Butter at pbuttner@calrice.org or (916) 206-5340.  For questions on practices we are pursuing, please contact Wildlife Programs Manager Luke Matthews at lmatthews@calrice.org or (916) 607-8988.  

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