California Ricelands Waterbird Foundation

What it reported doing in 2024

Over the past year or so, weve seen a continued transition to more reliance on use of our donor funds to keep significant numbers of enhanced habitat acres out on the landscape as the State investments continued to trend lower with lessening reduced overall concerns over drought conditions in California. With the support of all our many donors we have kept the habitat pipeline flowing and even forged new ground by continuing our pilot testing of new innovative approaches to nesting habitat. We also continued to assist our partner organizations in deploying their funding to projects helping birds the Sacramento Valley. Our Bid4Birds web-based platform continues at the one-stop shop for our partners to communicate about funded programs and gather digital applications from rice growers who are interested in participating. We accomplish this through implementation of several ongoing projects.Bid4Birds Habitat Program: This innovative habitat enhancement program focuses on creating critical shorebird and waterfowl habitat at the precise time periods when habitat is the most scarce. This special targeting of habitat investment, precisely where and when its most needed, provides cost-efficiencies by spending our donor funds within the exact weeks/months that are most critical. Thanks to our donors, this is our main perennial program delivering world-class waterbird habitat year-over-year. In fiscal year 2024-25, we supported both a Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 program. In both seasons, the Foundation supported the programs by hosting them on our Bid4Birds web platform to process bids and implement our analytic process for prioritizing projects. The Fall program created over 2,800 acres of valuable habitat from July through October 2024. This effort was funded by significant contributions from DWR and CDFW. The CDFW funds came to us through a unique partnership agreement involving The Nature Conservancy. The Spring 2025 program also created over 2,800 acres of valuable habitat from February to April. Testing New Approaches to Nesting Habitat: In fiscal year 2024-25, we continued our work piloting a new way of establishing cover crops for the purpose of providing nesting habitat for upland nesting waterbirds. Normally, a cover crop is planted in the fall after rice harvest and then grows over the course of the winter, thus the field could not be winter-flooded. Based on our previous years testing, we believe it is possible to establish the cover crop after winter-flooded rice fields have begun drawing down in late-winter if the grower is planning to idle the acres the following season. These kinds of innovative approaches warrant further study because our future will likely include a greater frequency of planned idling. This creates an opportunity to provide much needed upland nesting habitat for locally breeding waterfowl and to engage interested farmers who would benefit from other revenue streams when idling.This fiscal year, we again worked with one of our producer partners to fly-on the cover crop seed into winter-flooded fields in Butte County in February 2025. Enhancing our Winter-flooded Rice Acres: State funding investments into core winter flooding of ricelands continued this fiscal year with $250,000 of state funds deployed to projects using our Foundation website and implementation resources provided by CRC to administer the Program. Through this CRC-managed rollout, we are also able to offer an enhanced cost-share on the west side of the Valley where prohibitive water costs have been limiting winter-flooded rice acreage. Over 8,500 acres of winter-flooded rice were successfully enrolled into winter flooding contracts.

Financial Efficiency

• Mission deployment rate: 80%; rating input score 80
• Program expense ratio: 81.3%; rating input score 81

Transparency & Controls

• Consistency checks: 100%; rating input score 100; 52nd percentile among comparable filings
• Major donor itemization: Yes; rating input score 100

Sustainability

• Operating margin: 1.6%; rating input score 49; 49th percentile among comparable filings
• Total-asset coverage ratio: 3.73; rating input score 79; 79th percentile among comparable filings
• Liabilities to assets ratio: 0.11; rating input score 17; 17th percentile among comparable filings
• Officer compensation ratio: 0%; rating input score 56; 56th percentile among comparable filings

Growth

• Program expense growth: -1% per year; rating input score 0; 45th percentile among comparable filings
• Revenue growth: 4.1% per year; rating input score 100; 68th percentile among comparable filings
• Asset growth: 25.6% per year; rating input score 100; 89th percentile among comparable filings