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

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