Texas Rice Industry Coalition for the Environment (TRICE) enlists rice farmers to help restore native prairies and wetlands in national wildlife refuges, state wildlife management areas and private land along the upper half of the Texas Gulf Coast. Currently TRICE is focused on the 45,000-acre Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge, where it is restoring 15,000 acres of native prairie and 1,600 acres of wetlands by removing Chinese tallow trees and other invasive plants and by reinvigorating the rice fields that were once widespread within the refuge and beyond. In the 1970s, rice grew on 600,000 acres in an 18-county area known as the Texas Rice Belt; today fewer than 183,000 acres are under cultivation. In addition, regional wetland habitat continues to disappear. TRICE executive director Bill Stransky explains, “Rice farms currently offset the ongoing loss of freshwater habitat in the Gulf Coast area by creating seasonal wetlands when the fields are flooded. The fields provide rich habitat for migratory birds, nesting wading birds and shorebirds. TRICE meshes the interests of rice farmers with conservation and environmental goals by building levees and irrigation systems to create productive rice fields, which the Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge leases to farmers.” Stransky adds, “Rice farming keeps the land dynamic and productive. Without it, the land doesn’t go back to prairie; it goes to tallow trees.”

TRICE has selectively poisoned and burned thousands of acres of Chinese tallow trees, which once blanketed huge swaths of the refuge. The non-native forest eliminated a vital home for birds, particularly the mottled ducks that live in the region year-round and depend on inland wetlands, freshwater marshes and grassland habitat for their survival. Stransky surveys an expanse of rotting tallows that will soon give way to bluestem prairie and says, “This was once all open shallow wetlands and short grass. I hope one day to look out across the refuge from the highway and see not one Chinese tallow, just grassland prairie, wetlands and thousands of birds.”