We at Two Brooks Farm intend a life cycle assessment of the product you purchase to result in the lowest possible cost to our planet’s resources and to society. Our ecologically grown rice takes large strides in making a small ecological, carbon, and water footprint while maintaining production and quality in a symbiotic and biologically dynamic environment. We strive to keep our land use per calorie generated low, as well as our resource cost per calorie generated low--perhaps unmatched. Our production and processing system gives us mighty leverage to accomplish this.
Recycling water on our rich, heavy clay, composted, perfectly flat continuous rice land reduces the need for aquifer water and the energy to pump it. Some years it requires no additional irrigation--it is rain fed. This saves our aquifer for posterity, and the combustion of fossil fuels it would have taken to pump it.
We want farm emitted water at least as clean as it was when it entered, especially free of silt and fertilizer. We work to accomplish this through the filtering action of our connected labyrinth of continuous rice fields, which most waters we use cycle through. These flat fields and aquatic life they support do an outstanding job of filtering and recycling any excess resources, mitigating environmental pollution.
Carbon sequestration is enhanced with the highly elevated organic matter levels in our soil. This results from natural composting and the no or low tillage system that is integral to our production system.
Nature does nearly all of our tillage on our continuous rice fields, thereby reducing machinery carbon emissions. Nature’s activity on submerged fields generally smoothes soil and composts straw better and more efficiently than our farm equipment. Thousands of gallons of fuel are saved, and emissions omitted.
Waterfowl provide at minimum half of our fertility needs in our continuous rice fields, depositing most macro nutrients such as phosphorus and potassium, and all micro nutrients. They supply 25 to 50 percent of our nitrogen needs and spread it uniformly over fields, saving transport and application of thousands of tons of other organic fertilizers. Remaining nitrogen needs are met with small, calibrated applications of manufactured nitrogen, saving transport and over-application of much larger volumes of organic sources containing components unneeded by our soils.
On our continuous rice fields, we use no insecticides or fungicides in order to sustain the biological balance built in these fields through years of efforts. Herbicide use is minimized by the waterfowl that consume many lost and undesirable seed left after harvest and rogue spring seedlings, reducing threatening weed populations in subsequent crops.
The several acres of natural waterways and woodlands on our farm provide habitat for plants and animals that need space for their life cycles beyond that provided by our fields. This enhances bio-diversity and is a step toward the biological balance we seek on our farm.
Most rice is stem ripened in field, enhancing grain flavor while reducing drying costs to us and the environment.
Our single estate rice is stored and small batch milled on site in a kosher certified, highly sanitary facility dedicated to rice, situated among the fields from which it was harvested. Our practice minimizes food miles, saving transportation costs to us and the environment. This design also alleviates the possibility of varietal commingling common in larger operations, and contamination with possible allergens. Our system ensures we are able to deliver healthy, market focused, trait preserved, and ecologically beneficial rice directly from our farm, through our mill, on to your table.