Rice harvest nearly complete, yields and quality better than expected
by October 7, 2018 4:32 pm 902 views
Arkansas rice farmers have fought unusual weather this year and the assumption was that yields and quality would suffer, but at this point in the harvest that hasn’t been the case, rice agronomist Dr. Jarrod Hardke told Talk Business & Politics.
About 80% of the crop has been harvested statewide, and the majority of the remaining rice in the ground is in Northeast Arkansas, the primary rice growing area in the state, he said.
Harvest progress is on par with the five year averages, but is behind what farmers have gathered in recent years, he said. Hardke predicts yields to be in the 163-164 bushel per acre range, slightly down from last year when it was 166.4 bushels per acre, the third highest ever in the state. The final fields to be harvested are typically planted later in the growing season and have historically caused yields to decline at the end of the harvest, he added.
“Things are finally going well, … this sunshine has helped a lot,” he said. “Yield and quality have been good so far. Hopefully, it’s a trend that will continue.”
Farmers and agriculture industry leaders feared an unusually cold spring, and intensely hot summer, and unrelenting rains at critical moments in the season would cause yields and quality to drop. Recent rains delayed the harvest, and the longer the crop stays in the field the more problems that can develop, Hardke said.
During the next several days, the weather conditions are predicted to be sunny and clear with little chances for precipitation, according to the National Weather Service. Rain chances are expected to increase towards the middle of next week and temperatures are expected to drop as a cold front moves into the Arkansas Delta Region. Farmers will be working round the clock to clear fields before a new round of rains begins, Hardke said.
Arkansas farmers were projected to grow 1.4 million rice acres this season, an uptick from 2017 when about 1.161 million acres were planted. It was 47.1% of all rice acres planted in the U.S., according to the B.R. Wells Arkansas Rice Research study issued by the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture.
Those acres accounted for 82.6 million hundredweight of rice, and it represented 46.4% of the 178.2 million hundredweight produced in the country. During the last three years, Arkansas has accounted for more than 47% of the nation’s total rice production, the report found. Per acre, farmers had a yield of 164.4 bushels per acre or 7,400 pounds. It was the third highest yield on record in the state and a 570 pound per acre uptick from 2016.
Rice is grown in 40 of Arkansas’ 75 counties and is predominately grown in the eastern section of the state. The first rice crop was grown on a single acre in Lonoke County in 1902, although there are reports of the crop in the state before the Civil War, according to historians. Rice acres steadily grew from then and by 1955 the federal government initiated a set of controls capping the number of rice acres at 500,000. Controls were lifted in the 1970s, and the number of rice acres continued to grow. The state set its all-time rice acreage record in 2010 when farmers planted 1.785 million acres.