Wild Food
Processing Rice for Perpetuity
Heading out to harvest wild rice on Flowage Lake in McGregor, Minnesota.
WRITTEN BY CHRIS PASCONE | PHOTOGRAPHED BY LORIE SHAULL
Wild rice is a natural gift from the earth. It’s a nutrient-dense superfood, endemic to Lake Country, and it grows abundantly without chemicals or fertilizers. Wild rice is integral to Ojibwe culture, but anyone can harvest it on public lands with a $25 license. Awareness of wild rice has grown and today, many people are lobbying to protect the clean water that wild rice needs to thrive.
That said, few people know how to process wild rice—a necessary skill for rendering wild rice edible. This process includes curing, parching, threshing, winnowing, and finishing the rice, thereby removing the tough outer hull. There’s a lot of labor, skill, and knowledge that go into these steps, making it a rare—and valuable—art. Here’s how four wild rice processors in Lake Country are ensuring rice’s perpetuity as a lake-to-table food staple.
Winnowing the wild rice in a birch bark basket tosses away the husks while the heavier kernels fall to the bottom at a wild rice camp in Floodwood, Minnesota.
Scooping parched rice at Wild Rice House in Finland, Minnesota.
Processed wild rice at Wild Rice House in Finland, Minnesota.
Mille Lacs Wild Rice
Aitkin County is a center point of Minnesota’s wild rice traditions. Sitting on the Mississippi River, Aitkin is smack dab in the middle of rich wild rice habitat. It’s also home to Mille Lacs Wild Rice—an anchor of Minnesota’s wild rice industry. Selling under the brand name Canoe Wild Rice, Mille Lacs Wild Rice (canoewildrice.com) processes three to four million pounds of wild rice per year.
Joe Ratuski is a fourth-generation wild rice processor and general manager of Mille Lacs Wild Rice. Ratuski has worked in the family business since childhood. “The traditional stabilization step is parching, and that has remained the same throughout time,” says Ratuski. Parching takes the moisture out of the rice, using heat. “Our parchers take about six hundred pounds per unit, and the parching step takes two to two-and-a-half hours per batch,” explains Ratuski, who uses both natural gas-fired and wood-fired parchers. “Everything is done by batches. You have to check every batch by hand for the right heat exposure.”
In the early 1900s, Peter Ratuski started buying wild rice from the Indigenous harvesters of Red Lake, Ontario—six cents a pound, or traded for groceries from his small store.
Mille Lacs Wild Rice roasting in progress (photo courtesy of Mille Lacs Wild Rice Co.).
Mille Lacs Wild Rice processing plant located near Aitkin (photo courtesy of Mille Lacs Wild Rice Co.).
Ratuski’s processing facilities in Aitkin work twenty-four-seven for two months straight, from the end of August, when the first ripe Minnesota wild rice comes in, until late October, when the company is still processing wild rice imported from Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario. Mille Lacs Wild Rice employs fifteen to twenty full-time staff throughout the year, and in the fall, Ratuski brings on another twenty seasonal staff for the processing stage.
The family rice business was started in the early twentieth century as Shoal Lake Wild Rice by the late Peter Ratuski in Red Lake, Ontario, where the Ratuski family had settled after emigrating from Ukraine. The business kept growing for decades, and Peter’s sons Ben and Bill expanded the company by purchasing Mille Lacs Wild Rice Corporation in the 1980s. Ben’s son Chris (Joe’s father) then went on to fully purchase the company from his father and uncle. Chris started the Canoe Wild Rice retail brand that people can buy in supermarkets across the state, country, and abroad today.
While the Ratuski family business has continually grown and changed, Joe appreciates wild rice for its timelessness: “Wild rice is the grain native to North America. Technically it’s a grass, but it falls into the indigenous grain category. It’s non-GMO and is protected by law; it can’t be genetically modified. People are obviously becoming more health conscious, and what else, as far as something healthy to eat, is better than wild rice? The processing steps are so minimal; nothing is added to the rice. It’s natural.”
Autumn Grain
Many people in Minnesota choose to harvest their own rice. (For a list of wild rice waters near you, see the MN DNR’s “350 Important Wild Rice Waters in Minnesota.”) The question then becomes, “Where do I take it to be processed?”
Mark Wester, the owner of Autumn Grain, located in Kettle River, has been single-handedly processing upwards of fifteen thousand pounds of wild rice for customers every fall for the last sixteen years. Like Ratuski, Wester has made wild rice a lifestyle choice: he perpetuates the ricing heritage as a harvester and processor by focusing on processing for people who harvest rice themselves for their own subsistence lifestyle.
Wester’s clients are wide and varied. “The ricing community reminds me of when I lived in Grand Marais, with its dog sledders. There were dog sledders who did everything on a shoestring budget, and then there were more affluent community members in town who did dog sledding. It’s the same with ricing; people from all walks of life enjoy ricing.”
In a self-described “weaker moment,” Wester built a processing plant at his own home in 2010. “I’m a one-man show,” says Wester, “so the big thing for me is to schedule things pretty tight so I know what I’m doing each day. I don’t have people drop off or pick up rice until after 3:00 p.m. because of how busy it is in the mornings. I try not to get too far behind. Last year there were a few times when I had over three thousand pounds stored at one time. Then I just need to catch my breath.”
Adding wild rice to a grain cleaner at Wild Rice House in Finland, Minnesota.
Using high, clean moccasins to jig the parched rice which loosens the hulls at a wild rice camp in Floodwood, Minnesota.
Wester’s processing plant holds four parchers. He describes the process like this: “Haul the rice over to the shed, dump it in the parchers, get the parchers going. My parchers run on propane, not wood. The parchers stir the rice. When the rice is done, I scoop it into pails and take it over to two Davis hullers. They look like two 55-gallon drums welded together. They have a rubber lining, and there’s a cylinder inside that turns with three rubber paddles. The longer the rice is in the huller, the lighter it gets. I prefer a little on the darker side, because my feeling is why take so much of the bran off? The bran is where the nutrients are.” Both Wester and Ratuski stress that all wild rice is black: both cultivated and lake harvested. “Blonde” rice is simply kept in the dehuller longer.
After the hulling process is done, Wester carries the rice to a Clipper 27 fanning mill—an antique hardwood-framed mill that “cleans” the rice. The mill blows the hulls outside into a pile (“which master gardeners love for mulch,” says Wester). Then the rice goes into a separate room, which Wester calls the “finishing room.” Here, the rice goes on a Forsbergs Model 10 gravity table (his was built in Thief River Falls). The gravity table separates the rice by density and separates it from any debris. Finally, Wester has a grain separator, which can separate the broken “soup and hot-dish rice” from whole-kernel rice.
Frank Bibeau, White Earth Nation
For others, processing wild rice is about far more than food—it’s about culture, sovereignty, and stewardship. Frank Bibeau of the White Earth Nation is a tribal attorney who defends manoomin (Ojibwemowin for “wild rice”) in court. He wrote the Rights of Manoomin to codify that wild rice has rights to pure water and freshwater habitat, which he modeled after the International Rights of Nature Tribunal: a permanent, citizen-created initiative designed to hear cases of environmental destruction and judge them based on the Rights of Nature. (Created by the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature in 2014, the International Rights of Nature Tribunal acts as a “people’s tribunal” to fill the gap left by international law, which traditionally views nature as property or a resource.)
Bibeau represented manoomin and the White Earth Band of Ojibwe in Manoomin v DNR in White Earth Tribal Court, a landmark tribal court case in 2021, and in DNR v White Earth Band of Ojibwe and Chief Judge DeGroat in Minnesota District Court and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2022. The Minnesota DNR moved to dismiss, citing sovereign immunity and a lack of jurisdiction. Ultimately, on March 10, 2022, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe Court of Appeals ruled that the Tribal Court lacked subject-matter jurisdiction, largely because the disputed actions were taken by nonmembers outside of the reservation’s boundaries. While the legal issues in cases such as these are complex, they reflect a broader effort by many Indigenous communities to protect the waters that sustain wild rice.
Nevertheless, for the White Earth Band, wild rice continues to be a subsistence lifestyle. Bibeau himself processes wild rice and makes smoked whitefish at his family’s homestead in Ball Club on the Leech Lake Reservation.
Bibeau typically buys a thousand pounds of rice directly at the boat landing from local harvesters in early September “so that it’s all uniform,” he explains. He then processes it with friends and relatives using his family’s practices. “Running your hands through the rice in the parcher feels like picking up hot sand on the beach,” Frank smiles.
Bibeau then takes this finished rice to his presentations at various law schools. “I was talking at Yale recently. I’m going to Harvard next,” recounts Bibeau. “I’ve created a different legal mechanism that people said couldn’t be done. Law schools want to teach about it, because while it hasn’t been fully adopted, I haven’t really been stopped. They know that I’m perpetuating the culture.”
Ricing is important to Bibeau as a method of communal subsistence living. He views processing as a community service: “There aren’t that many processors out there today,” Bibeau notes, “and they seem to be older people.”
Bibeau strives to keep the process alive by mentoring the next generation. One such mentee is Blake Hawbaker, who is now the lead processor at Finland Rice House. “Blake is an exception,” says Bibeau. “He’s got a whole team of young folks up in Finland. They’re an example of keeping these traditions going and making it a community service. And I really respect their approach. It’s not about making money, it’s about everybody eating well and getting real food.”
Removing the wild rice from the parcher at Wild Rice House in Finland, Minnesota.
Finland Rice House
Way up in the northeast corner of Minnesota lies the rugged town of Finland. It’s the place you want to be if you have a penchant for living off the land. Finlanders are proud of the subsistence lifestyle that many adopt here, aided by the Finland Food Chain: a collaborative project of food producers, consumers, and businesses that makes an interrelated local food system. A key component of the Finland Food Chain is Manoomin Waakaa’igan (Ojibwe), or Villirisi Talo (Finnish), which both mean “Wild Rice House.”
Blake Hawbaker is proud of Rice House’s ability to work with everyone: “There are people that bring it in soaking wet right off the lake, and others that bring it in cracker dry. We take it all. Since we’re a nonprofit, we can take the time to try to get people as much processed rice back as feasible, no matter what they bring in.”
Hawbaker loves working with wild rice because of its variations: “Rice from different lakes, even different parts of the same lake, can vary as a result of environmental factors,” explains Hawbaker. These variations can include different kernel lengths or differing thicknesses, with a subsequently longer or shorter parching time.
For Hawbaker, proper parching is the key to processing: “Parching is where the skill is. There’s a lot of nuance, because rice is a wild food. When I train in my assistants, I have to tell them: ‘Hey guys, we’re letting the rice tell us when it’s done. We have a number of methods to keep an eye on its progress, but there’s no one factor, like a certain temperature or a certain amount of time, that dictates when it’s done.’”
Parching rice takes two to three hours to remove the water content and get the hulls ready for removal, thereby making the rice shelf stable. Finland Rice House uses a wood-fired parcher which stirs itself. Hawbaker checks the rice initially after ninety minutes, and then frequently after that: “You’ve got to touch it, feel it, break open the kernels, and look at what they look like on the inside of the kernel. Just about every batch can be different.”
Hawbaker notes that processing rice is itchy, dusty, and hot. But he loves that every batch is custom made. “Rice is truly a wild food, and you really have to interact with it, even in processing it. There’s no just straight-up rubric.”
A ricing pole used to propel a canoe for wild ricing in shallow, sandy, or muddy waters. The fork is designed so as not to damage rice stalks when poling.
Perpetuating Heritage
Wild rice has sustained people in the Great Lakes region for more than two thousand years, and preserving the traditions, knowledge, and craftsmanship that make it table-ready goes hand in hand with protecting the waters where it grows. The culture of wild rice processing demands hard work, skill, patience, and an ability to interpret what the rice itself requires. And thanks to the dedication of processors like Mille Lacs Wild Rice, Autumn Grain, Frank Bibeau, Finland Rice House, and others across the region, this remarkable grain, and the heritage and stewardship woven into it, will continue to nourish future generations.
Wild Rice Waters in Minnesota
The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has compiled a list of the 350 most important wild rice waters in Minnesota, which appear in the counties of Aitkin, Anoka, Becker, Beltrami, Carlton, Cass, Clearwater, Cook, Crow Wing, Hubbard, Isanti, Itasca, Koochiching, Lake, Lake of the Woods, Mille Lacs, Morrison, Otter Tail, Pine, Rice, Scott, Sherburne, St. Louis, Stearns, Todd, Wabesha, Wadena, Waseca, and Wright.
For the full report, including a detailed list of lakes and rivers and wild rice coverage, check out “350 Important Wild Rice Waters in Minnesota.”