Rice is one of hundreds of crops that grow in the Central Valley, the heartland of a multi-billion dollar agrotechnological industry in California. Since rice was first planted at an experiment station in the early 1900s, rice fields of the Central Valley have become sites of intense mechanization and commercial food production. We can analyze and critique this shift as an eradication of multispecies life in favor of a modernist grid that generates profit for a few and catastrophe for the rest. But things are a bit more complicated. Since the 1990s, these rice fields have become surrogate habitats for migratory waterbirds that travel every year between North and South America. In other words, private farms now serve as the last remaining wetlands of the Central Valley. How did that happen and how do they work? Is this something to refuse or support? By engaging with California rice, this talk aims to consider the term "compromise" in at least two ways: first, rice fields are compromised landscapes that emerge from multiple interweaving histories and violent exterminations in order to persist; and second, their future depends on a capacity for attunement and compromise with more-than-human infrastructures and agencies, rather than an increase in technoscientific control. As droughts and wildfires recur with increasing intensities and frequencies, these may soon be the last rice fields of California.