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Home Grown

Farmer-distributor makes big (and small) impact

By Gabrielle Myers
April 2026

You can’t talk to local farmers without somebody mentioning Next Generation Foods.

With packing operations in West Sacramento and fields in Yuba and Sutter counties, Next Generation is a grower and distributor that supplies restaurants and venues with rice, beans, quinoa, even popcorn.

The company has supplied Chef Billy Ngo’s Kru and his other restaurants for almost 20 years. Next Generation serves The Kitchen, Mulvaney’s and UC Davis Medical Center. Popcorn at Golden 1 Center comes from Pleasant Grove Farms via Next Generation.

I talked to Next Generation founder and owner Michael Bosworth and learned how his company helps sustain the farm-to-fork culture.

Bosworth grew up farming. He says, “Both my father’s and mother’s sides have been ranching in California since the 1870s, primarily cattle, but other crops as well. I moved to the Wheatland area when I was 10, where my stepfather and his family farmed rice and had cattle. That’s how I got going into the rice deal. I grew up on a rice farm.”

Bosworth studied crop science at UC Davis with a master’s in agricultural economics. For a school project, he followed an agricultural product through the supply chain. He had to figure out who was making money.

He learned the farmer earned about 11 cents on the dollar. “At that point, I just decided to capture more of the value stream, and that’s when we started selling our rice directly, in 2006,” he says.

Bosworth works with a core group of about a dozen farmers who practice mostly organic, sustainable farming. Customers come in all shapes and sizes.

A significant part of Next Generation’s business involves selling to corporate kitchens at Google, Facebook and Nvidia, plus universities and hospitals. UC Davis was the first big account.

Next Generation’s retail brand is called True Origin Foods. Under this label, individual consumers can buy rice, beans and grains at grocery stores or the company’s website.

For sustainable practices, Bosworth and his team practice cover cropping in winter. After harvest, they cut the rice straw and disc it into the soil. They plant vetch and other legumes such as bell beans and winter peas to fix nitrogen and “then just wait for the rain,” he says.

Before spring planting, the cover crop is turned into the field, adding more nitrogen to the soil. Other sustainable approaches include technology to reduce unnecessary watering and fertilizer use.

“What we try to do is minimize inputs,” Bosworth says. “We use GPS technology to level all of our fields, so the right amount of water is in the right spot on every part of the field, which helps us reduce water use.”

Next Generation has computers in its harvesters to plot data points. The computers measure how much rice comes in and compensate for speed and moisture. The information receives unique GPS data points.

“When we’re done with harvest, we create a map that says these are the good areas of the field, these are the bad areas,” Bosworth says. “When we go to fertilize the next spring, we actually write a prescription for that field. We can select layers in the mapping system to look at yield and moisture and create a prescription map and then we put out a variable rate of fertilizer to compensate for those variations.”