Sharing Butte Creek

(rice harvester)

NARRATOR

A gigantic mechanized harvester cuts through a field of super-premium California Rice. Fleets of these machines work similar fields across five hundred thousand acres of the Northern Sacramento Valley. More than four billion pounds are harvested Trucked, dried, and stored in enormous warehouses and silos. Strategically dispensed to high-tech milling facilities, it is milled, packaged and shipped to consumers all over the world.

This is the heart of California's rice industry that employs twenty-five thousand people and generates five billion dollars each year. And all of it made possible by more than a hundred years of intense environmental engineering to transform the natural wetlands that once were here... into a rice factory. But unlike most agri-businesses in California's central valley, driven solely for the commodities they produce, this region is different.

Within, and all around, the many rice fields and orchards is.... habitat for two hundred plus wildlife species. food for seven to ten million birds that migrate along the Pacific Flyway. and the most successful salmon recovery anywhere. These are the fruits of a determined effort to change the legacy of environmental exploitation and habitat loss so familiar in California - And to reconcile the demands of modern civilization with the needs of nature.

Coreen Davis

Seeing what the rice industry has been able to do in this part of our little piece of the world has been something that has changed people's thinking...

Nicole Montna Van Vleck

We're doing so much more than farming rice, we're farming for the birds and we're farming for fish.

Bryce Lundberg

...it became an amazing opportunity to have a relationship with the environment in a very productive way."

NARRATOR

And running through it all is a modest ribbon of water called Butte Creek. The novel partnerships that first surfaced here and the environmental successes that flowed from them are now models for conservation efforts all across the Northern Sacramento Valley... and beyond. (Faint bird song) (pick-up truck) It is late fall and the harvest is long over.

Farmers all across the Northern Sacramento Valley are again diverting water to their fields...but not for growing crops, this flow is for nature. (Water gushing) The water flooding this field - and hundreds of thousands of acres like it - is the opposite of typical farming practice. Instead of hurrying the water off the land - draining it and drying it out - in preparation for cultivation next spring, this water will sit calf-deep all winter long, creating vast stretches of wetland habitat, and spinning rice straw... into food.

These flooded fields represent a sea change a radical departure from the environmental history of this region that began even before California became a state. Ole Timey Western Folk Theme

Allen Harthorn

Butte Creek was the last stream to the north that had gold... The miners came in and pretty much disrupted everything. Initially starting out with small scale mining and then eventually building dams and diverting water...

Allen

And then eventually a whole type of mining equipment

was developed

the dredgers. And Butte Creek was a perfect place to literally come in, dig a hole, build a dredge, fill it up with water, and start clawing through the floodplain. And dozens and dozens of these large dredgers completely turned the floodplain upside down.

NARRATOR

The economy of California began to shift in the latter part of the 19th century from mining to agriculture. Along Butte Creek European immigrants found rich soils, a sunny climate and plenty of water.

Bryce Lundberg

The first settlers that came here... they thought they were going to grow corn and wheat, they thought they could grow trees, and they got here and they found out that this soil is clay... and when it rains, the soil is like glue and when it's dry in the summer, the soil, without water, is like rocks.... They couldn't grow wheat, they couldn't grow corn, they couldn't grow trees on this soil.

This soil is rice soil!

NARRATOR

Butte County capitalized on its natural gifts to become the heart of California's rice industry. But the conditions so favorable in most years could also swing between brutal extremes - devastating floods and cruel droughts. As farms and cities grew, so did the demand for flood control, reliable water supplies, and power.

Allen Harthorn

DeSabla Centerville Hydro-electric project started in the early nineteen hundreds... So two dams were built both divert water out of the creek, down the flumes and through the powerhouses.

NARRATOR

Together with growing agricultural interests, more dams were built on Butte Creek along with an ever-tightening grid of levees. The reclamation projects divorced the rivers from the surrounding floodplain, they destroyed natural wetland habitat and blocked wildlife migration. What was happening on Butte Creek was happening all over California. By the mid 20th century every single river on the east side of the valley had been dammed, thousands of miles of levees built, and all but a tiny fraction of the state's wetlands...

were gone. (crackling

ground fire) NARRATOR

Not only did rice production destroy natural habitat... it polluted the air. To rid their fields of rice straw, growers would set their fields ablaze. Half a million burning acres sent a pall of smoke over the valley for weeks on end.

The rice straw Burning Reduction Act, passed in 1991, threatened to devastate the rice industry.

Rodd Kelsey

And so, to figure out new ways to getting rid of that straw -- one of the great win-wins for conservation and for farming was the idea that we could flood these fields allowing the straw to decompose over the winter but at the same time creating tremendous wetland habitat for millions of water birds. (water flowing)

Bryce Lundberg

...Initially it was done with the idea that we need to decompose the rice straw but birds came - amazing amount of birds - millions of birds - came to use the rice fields that were flooded for habitat and to eat the rice that was left. (birds taking off)

NARRATOR

But even as birds began to rebound native fish populations were collapsing.

Allen Harthorn

Right about the time the state water project started operating - things really crashed...

Ted Trimble

In between the early 60s and the mid 90s the returning fish were really low - like in the hundreds of fish returning.

Paul Ward

So that was kind of a wake up to people...

NARRATOR

Paul Ward worked for the Department of Fish & Game in the 1970's. His job was to monitor fish passage on Butte Creek.

Paul Ward

In general, there was inadequate flow during key times of the year - both for adults and juveniles. There were no fish screens and many of the dams below... during key times of the year the water was cut off. And so the fish passage both adult and juvenile was terrible, it was only in a very unusual year that you either got all the adults up or juveniles out.

The other thing was, the upper watershed, the prime holding habitat, the water was being diverted out of that, the last six or eight miles. PG&E was diverting water out to produce power. So the temperatures during the summer when the adults would have been here was lethal.

Ted Trimble

Over the years, the fish never improved... we anticipated an eventual listing of the spring run Chinook under the endangered species act.

Allen Harthorn

The endangered fish listing... That was certainly a big threat... All of a sudden there was a whole lot of other people were concerned about what effect it might have on their business, on their land, on their use of the water. So that got everybody talking.

NARRATOR

The threat was so dire, the problem - so complex,

it forced a revolution in thought and practice

Collaboration.

Timothy Quinn

You can't do a project like Butte Creek any way other than collaboration. You can't regulate it - that's for sure - it's too complex, you need too many people cooperating.

Ted Trimble

You had the farmers partnering up with urban water agencies from LA. We also partnered with state and federal government - the people that typically regulate irrigated agriculture. And this was truly unprecedented because partnerships like that didn't exist back then.

Dale Hall

When people come together and say, we all want the same thing, can't we just find out what we have in common and work together? All of a sudden new lights start to come on, new partnerships start to be formed and all of a sudden cooperation breeds success and success breeds success.

NARRATOR

Their main assault hammered at the dams. Led by Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, they demolished four dams - opening up twenty-five miles of Butte Creek to unimpeded flow. The Western Canal Water District - the largest irrigator in the region - replaced its dams with an ingenious device.

Ted Trimble

We decided to tunnel underneath Butte Creek... what that tunnel is technically called is an inverted siphon.... but it's basically a tunnel.

NARRATOR

The remaining dams on Butte Creek were retrofitted with fish ladders and screens. Flows were increased and monitored to meet new threshold levels. No longer would adults be blocked from spawning grounds or juveniles flushed out to irrigation canals.

Allen Harthorn

That whole process particularly from highway 99 below Chico down through the Sutter Buttes was fixed in a matter of seven or eight years. And then the process moved down into the Butte Sink and the Sutter Bypass and that is still ongoing down there.

NARRATOR

The response was immediate.

Ted Trimble

The first year after our project we had twenty thousand fish return in the spring. Now, there is a sustaining population of six to eight thousand fish returning on average each year, that's just a phenomenal recovery.

NARRATOR

A team from California Department of Fish and wildlife is suiting up - to survey the year's population.

Clint Garmin

And they are looking at the condition of the fish. If we find any dead carcasses, they will take biological samples, but essentially it is just monitoring the condition and health of the fish over the summer time. Everybody's been through some swift water rescue training. It can be pretty treacherous, I mean the terrain is uneven - high flows.

The adults that returned have great conditions, so they are just hanging out all summer long in cool pools and waiting for fall time temperatures to cool down... and they'll spawn the last week of September to about the end of October.

NARRATOR

Of the three waterways in California that still support spring-run Chinook salmon, Butte Creek is by far the most prolific. The average return of about eight thousand or so, represents nearly ninety percent of the entire state's population. Butte Creek has become the poster child for Salmon Recovery in the state. But this is not the end of the story; in some ways, it's just the beginning.

Jacob Katz

There was a bunch of great work that happened on Butte Creek. But it's work that's been done in a lot of places. What was really unique and surprising about Butte Creek was when that work was done, when ladders were put to get fish over diversions, when dams were taken out. The fish population responded so dramatically and so quickly.

And in hindsight, we saw that there was another aspect present in Butte Creek that wasn't present in other places, and that was that Butte Creek was still connected, was still consistently every year connected to its floodplains, that the water of Butte Creek would spill out over its natural levees and out onto a floodplain and then move back in, but not just of its natural levees, the system was managed in duck clubs, in refuges, both state and federal, for waterfowl to interact with the landscape in a way that the rest of the Sacramento River and its tributaries just doesn't do anymore. (chain link clanks) (roar of pick up truck)

NARRATOR

That connection - that interaction led fish biologists from the University of California at Davis to look beyond the creek itself its fish ladders and screens - and out onto the floodplain.

There they found another key to salmon recovery

food lots of food.

Carson Jeffres

The floodplains are good for juvenile fish because they are basically food factories. And when the water spreads out, the food grows, the fish eat the food and that's when the fish are growing big. In the river there's just not a lot of food - and there never was historically and that's the reason why the floodplains are beneficial. We sample the water to understand...

what type of food will grow there...

NARRATOR

Temperature, pH, Chlorophyll, and many other variables are measured and recorded across the watershed throughout the winter and spring. It's all part of finding the best recipe for what these field researchers call "Zoop Soup."

Eric Holmes

This thing is chock full of zooplankton... it's so full it won't even drain out of there.

Carson Jeffres

There are so many zooplankton, which are... little microscopic bugs - those are what the fish are eating...

Eric Holmes

Wow...! A lot of fish food there!

Carson Jeffries

And we like to call it the 'zoop soup.' (water splashing)

Eric Holmes

Here fishy fishy - ya, ya, ya'all get in the net now...

Carson Jeffres

We go out and seine fish in the natural environment to see how fish use it.

Eric Holmes

This is filthy with salmon right now... Whoa... that's a salmon...! That's a fat one too.

Yeah... that's a spring-run size one! Each fish... gets its weight taken, and we look at the condition of the fish, and look at the body proportions.

NARRATOR

What those measurements show is, salmon from the flooded rice fields and wetlands within the Butte Creek watershed grow on average three times bigger and fatter than their peers confined to the rivers.

Eric Holmes

Oh hey - look at that!

NARRATOR

Their robust size and high condition - so extraordinary in the Butte Creek watershed - inspired a question of paradigm shifting proportion. Could the rice fields all around be managed to mimic Butte Creek's connected floodplain? In other words, could Butte Creek be the model for recovery efforts all across the Northern Sacramento Valley? (wind) (technical equipment) Researchers from California Trout are working to answer that question.

Juvenile salmon are being prepped for their stay in a field laboratory cut into the corner of a rice farm. This research project is all about finding just the right amount of residence time - the time it takes for a reactivated floodplain to grow food and ultimately fish.

Jacob Katz

What we're really talking about is the power of puddles to create life... to move... this - you might think this is just a piece of grass. It's rice straw, right?

That's a battery. This is stored solar energy. We want to get that energy not just into the water, but into salmon. We want to be able to manage the landscape in such a way that we can route energy and matter into the populations where it really matters that we're targeting that are now endangered.

And we think we can do that fairly simply by reactivating this former wetland floodplain.

NARRATOR

Giving fish access to the reactivated floodplain is another key goal. Researchers propose modifying some of the state's existing flood control structures - like the Tisdale Weir.

Jacob Katz

...So Tisdale Weir and all the weirs in the system the connection between the river and the floodplain look like this most of the time. They're dry. The floodplain is dry most of the time. And that's because these weirs are so high.

The water is too low on the other side of this - it doesn't come through this weir. It acts as a dam most of the time. But if you were to cut a gate right here so that it could open when you wanted it and close when you didn't, that would mean that water and fish could access the floodplain at the times when it makes sense - meaning we can get big water benefits in normal and dry years.

NARRATOR

Despite the certain benefit, the hard truth is... most of these rice fields won't be reconnected to the river anytime soon and most fish, now trapped in the rivers, will never get access to them. So... instead of bringing the fish to the food, researchers are now studying how to deliver the food to the fish - the fishery version of Grubhub, or Doordash.

Jacob Katz

This water sits out here for three weeks until it's literally seething with invertebrates. Then the field drains to the pumping plant and the pumping plant pumps the water. Now, rich with all of this fish food into the Sacramento River where young fish are trapped in a food desert.

NARRATOR

To document the effect, fish are placed in cages both upstream and downstream. A suite of data is collected, but most importantly, overall growth rates are measured and compared every week for a month and a half.

Jacob Katz

And what we find is that the fish that are right in the plume of that water, of that floodplain goodies coming out, those grow four or five times as fast as the fish just upstream that don't have access to it.

NARRATOR

And the fish food buffet doesn't just stay there, it caters to hungry fish far down river. Caged test fish - six miles downstream - still grew up to three times faster than their counterparts just above the outfall. All strong evidence that much of the existing agriculture system can be managed not only to grow fish food but deliver it back into the river where fish can feast on it.

Jacob Katz

And what we're showing here is that if you manage the landscape with a knowledge of nature, with the knowledge of the patterns of how this place, the Sacramento Valley, worked before... European settlement, and integrate that into the way that we manage our water, that we farm our fields, we can have a system that works so much better for both people and for the environment... What we're talking about is not going back, we're not talking about allowing the Sacramento Valley to flood for months at a time in a haphazard fashion... it isn't an interruption to how business is done out here.

It's an augmentation. It's an enhancement. It's saying, yes, in the summer we're going to make food and money for people. The same grounds in fall and winter and early spring can reactivate can reenergize our river ecosystems.

That also translates to reactivating California's economy because... a functioning river ecosystem that can actually produce robust, healthy populations of fish and wildlife is a system that is much better able to deliver water security to both our farms and our cities.

NARRATOR

It is early spring. Farmers all across this watershed begin the careful diversion of Butte Creek water onto their waiting fields. These flows signal the start of another production year. As waterways go in California, Butte Creek is modest a mere hundred miles long.

But Butte Creek carries an outsized story. From its headwaters, through the middle reaches and out across the floodplain, water users have learned to manage this watershed as an interconnected whole, for the benefit of both humans and nature. Many believe Butte Creek is the very definition of reconciliation ecology's promise of win-win...

Ted Trimble

In my mind the environment won... the farmers won... down stream water users win... so, when we can come up with partnered solutions to complex ecosystem problems and still be able to maintain what we're doing that is the definition of win-win.

Bryce Lundberg

You probably could just add a lot more wins

on that

win, win, win, win... I don't know if it's two three four, five wins.

Timothy Quinn

...A win for the local farmers... a huge win for the environment... And it was a win for the state as a whole, in showing a different better way to go about ecosystem restoration than what we've been trying unsuccessfully for decades.

Coreen Davis

I think this is such a perfect example of how we can all use the land for multiple benefit -...For people, for farms, for birds, for fish - we are an example of how a resource can continue to work for different species and people included.

Nicole Montna Van Vleck

I hope that this will be the success story a hundred years from now that we really can look back at and say, we were able to fix it, we were able to undo what we had done and... put it back - maybe not exactly as it was prior to the levees coming up but enough that we were able to really make a difference like we did on Butte Creek and have that success story throughout the valley. (water gushing)

NARRATOR

As the harvest winds down, farmers again prepare their fields for winter. Soon... the birds will return, so many they will darken the sky, and newly hatched salmon will make their way out onto the floodplain to grow fat before heading out to the ocean. These flooded fields are the wetlands of yore.

And while their laser leveled, gravity irrigated, precision grids may look different than the ancient floodplain, they function the same way. It is a modern version of the ancient cycle... A sharing of Butte Creek for the benefit of all the species that live here. (Geese Honking)