Portside

Koda Farms, whose heirloom rice has been prized by chefs and home cooks alike for almost a century, is shutting down.

The closure of the family-owned farm in Merced County, which Keisaburo Koda started 97 years ago, was first reported by the New York Times. His grandchildren, third-generation farmers Robin and Ross Koda, run the farm today. The rising costs of farming in California, from fertilizer to insurance and labor, have put undue pressure on the small operation.

“It’s time,” Robin Koda told the Chronicle on Monday. “Over the years, the challenges have become more than we want to handle.”

Koda Farms’ heirloom rice is a staple in many of the country’s top restaurants, a product so beloved many chefs vividly recall the first time they tasted it, even years later. The family produces varieties from brown rice to sweet glutinous rice for its mochiko flour, and famously spent a decade developing a new Japanese-style heirloom variety called Kokuho Rose. Bred specifically for the farm’s soil and climate in the 1960s, Kokuho Rose remains enduringly popular today. It’s the rice of choice for chefs like Sylvan Mishima Brackett of Rintaro in San Francisco and Brandon Jew of San Francisco’s Michelin-starred restaurant Mister Jiu’s. Jew’s 2021 cookbook features a photograph of Robin Koda in the rice fields and a tribute to the “sweet, floral” rice and its legacy in California. 

Robin and Ross Koda are in their 60s. They have no succession plan: “I would never tell my kids they have to farm because it’s just an unforgiving, relentless profession,” Robin Koda said. But thanks to trademarks that their grandfather obtained decades ago, Koda Farms’ products will live on. The Kodas licensed five of their trademarks to Western Foods, a grain manufacturer in Woodland (Yolo County), Robin Koda said. Western will continue to produce their rice under strict licensing agreements that mandate quality standards.

“This is a golden opportunity to preserve the integrity of the product,” Robin Koda said. “They will continue to meet the hallmarks that our grandfather set in place.”

Keisaburo Koda, a former school principal, immigrated to the U.S. from Ogawa, Japan, in 1908. He plied various trades — wildcatting for oil, working in laundromats and opening a tuna canning company — before going into rice farming. Amid anti-Asian sentiment and the California Alien Land Law of 1913, which prevented Chinese, Japanese and other Asian immigrants from owning or leasing agricultural land, he had to look farther and farther south in California, beyond the more established farmland of the Sacramento Valley, to find someone who would sell him land, Robin Koda said. He bought the South Dos Palos (Merced County) land that would become Koda Farms under his American-born sons’ names. 

The Koda family was displaced to Colorado because of Japanese internment during World War II, forced to temporarily hand over the farm to a new operator until their release in 1945. When they returned, just 1,000 acres of the “worst soil” remained, Robin Koda said. They moved about a mile down the road and started over.

Keisaburo helped pioneer new rice techniques, including sowing seeds with airplanes, and became known as the “Rice King of California.” Koda Farms operates its own seed nursery, drying and milling facilities, which has helped preserve quality over the decades, Robin Koda said. He died in 1964.

Bay Area chefs were devastated by the news of Koda Farms’ closure. Theirs was the “childhood rice” of Brackett, who has been serving it at Rintaro since he opened the California-Japanese restaurant in 2014. Gaby Maeda, chef at Friends and Family in Oakland and formerly of the Michelin-starred State Bird Provisions in San Francisco, was first exposed to the company as a fourth-grader growing up on Oahu, Hawaii, learning in a school cooking class how to make mochiko chicken with Koda Farms’ sweet rice flour. 

“That blue star on the white box will always be the most iconic thing,” she said, referring to the rice flour’s packaging. Her family’s rice cooker was often filled with half white rice, half Koda Farms brown rice. She used the rice flour again as a young chef at State Bird Provisions to create a savory mochi dish that became a yearslong menu staple. 

“We never tried any other flour because if it’s perfect the way it is, don’t change it,” Maeda said. “They’ve (had) such a huge impact on so many different restaurants around the country.”

C-Y Chia, co-owner of the recently closed Lion Dance Cafe in Oakland, has been cooking with Koda Farms’ rice since the restaurant’s early pop-up days. The mochiko rice flour was essential to Lion Dance Cafe’s popular nian gao dessert, a chewy coconut cake. Not only was the product top-tier, Chia felt connected to the history behind it.

“The people behind companies matter. It’s sad that the conditions have become such that they cannot continue and carry on with their legacy,” Chia said. “There’s definitely a bit of grieving (and) a bit of fear — it’s an indicator of how bad things have gotten.”

The closure, chefs said, is another reminder of the sharply rising costs affecting the entire food industry. 

“Unfortunately, everything is temporary in life but you get so used to a certain quality,” Maeda said. “When it’s gone — that’s why it’s so important to not take farms for granted.”

Western Foods did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Western President Miguel Reyna told the New York Times that the company will farm some Kokuho Rose rice in Dos Palos as well as in the Sacramento Delta region, but will move all processing and packaging to Northern California. Some of Koda’s Blue Star Mochiko and Diamond K rice flours may also be processed at Western’s mill in Arkansas. 

Under the licensing agreements, Koda Farms’ packaging will mostly remain intact — including the photograph of Keisaburo Koda standing in the rice fields that decorates many of the company’s bags of rice.

Reach Elena Kadvany: Elena.Kadvany@sfchronicle.com

Elena Kadvany has been a reporter on the Chronicle’s Food & Wine team since 2021. She covers the ins and outs of the Bay Area food industry, from breaking news about the latest restaurant openings to investigative stories into wage theft and workers’ rights. In 2024, her food writing portfolio won second place in the Society for Features Journalism Excellence-in-Features awards. Previously, she covered restaurants and education for the Palo Alto Weekly; her work has also been published in Bon Appetit and the Guardian, and her reporting has been recognized by the California News Publishers Association.

She can be reached at Elena.Kadvany@sfchronicle.com.