Two Minnesota men are each facing a handful of misdemeanor charges for illegally harvesting wild rice in Becker County more than a month ago.
The men, ages 54 and 36, are each accused of harvesting the grain with illegal equipment and outside of harvest hours.
Charging documents say the men were using an airboat on Height of Land Lake around 6:30 p.m. on Aug. 28. When conservation officers arrived about an hour later, they found the two men moving bags of rice from the boat to a canoe in the back of a pickup truck.
When asked what they were doing, one of the men told officers that they were “picking our rice.” The boat, which had a White Earth registration sticker and was registered to one of the charged men, had a mechanical harvester and a propeller. It also had a motor-driven reel on the front of the boat, according to the document.
The next day, an aerial inspection of the lake was done by conservation officers, who found damaged rice in the area where the boat was used. Using a mapping system, the complaints say the estimated damage and harvest area was nearly 30 acres.
Both men were charged by summons and are not in custody. The complaints also said videos posted to YouTube showed the two defendants interacting with the officers when they were all on shore.
In Minnesota, wild rice that isn’t green or unripe can be harvested from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily between Aug. 15 and Sept. 30. Grain must be harvested with a handheld flail that is less than 30 inches long and made of wood. It is illegal to use any machine or mechanical device to harvest the grain, except in certain circumstances, according to the Department of Natural Resources. Those include the operator holding a fee title to all the property that surrounds the public water where the harvest is happening, the water is less than 125 acres in size, is within the original boundaries of any reservation and there’s no direct public access.
Any tribal band member who has a valid tribal ID card from a federally recognized tribe in Minnesota has a license to harvest wild rice and doesn’t need an additional state wild rice harvesting license. That rule became valid in 2016, according to the DNR.
