4/2/2018
Rice Mills in the Sacramento Valley
I spent a fair amount of time driving around the northern Central Valleys last fall photographing agricultural industrial structures for another project. Of the various building types, I think rice mills are my favorite. Tomato paste canneries are just about as interesting but typically harder to access. Rice is grown in large quantities north of Sacramento. The center of rice production is Sutter County but it's grown as far north as Willows along the Sacramento, Feather and other minor rivers. It's a little odd that a crop like rice, which is flood irrigated, is grown in an area as prone to drought and water shortages as the Central Valley. But water shortages in California for one farmer or city are often irrelevant for another. California water politics is a strange beast.
Rice mills are highly specialized industrial structures. Their form entirely follows function. The rice comes to the mill as paddy which includes the hull and bits of the stalk and other vegetative matter. The rice is dried and then gently crushed between rubber rollers. The hull and other leafy or stalk material is blown up by massive fans while the heavier rice falls into collecting conduits and conveyers. It's an elaborate and highly engineered air separation process that I don't really understand. But one can see the massive fan housings, duct work, and mazes of conveyors in any rice mill. Huge piles of rice hull can sometimes be found near the mills as in the photo above. Typically though the hull is sold for animal feed or burned for fuel or otherwise used. Paddy and cleaned rice are stored in massive conditioned concrete silos which can be seen towering all over the otherwise flat river valleys. Birds flock to the rice mills, or any grain mill for that matter, for the free food. The mills that have been unused for a while, like the one above, host large colonies of birds that feed off discarded grain and live inside the silos. The noise they make flying round the massive empty chambers can be amazing. The mill in the photos above and below is just outside Willows. It hasn't been used in several years. Other than the constant racket of the birds it was silent when I was there. Its towering, sculptural form was, for me, cathedral like. In the photo above, belts that drove the machinery are piled in front of the rice hull.
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