2018 Tough Year For Louisiana Rice Producers

By Don Molino

The Voice of Louisiana Agriculture

LSU AgCenter Rice Specialist Dr. Dustin Harrell at the Rice Research Station in Crowley says 2019 “was a really tough season” across Louisiana rice fields as growers faced petty much poor growing conditions the whole season which took a toll on yields.

Speaking during the 2019 USA Rice Outlook Conference in Little Rock, Harrell said the 2019 season actually began right after the 2018 harvest. After harvest last year “It stared raining and really didn’t quit,” with most of the tillage coming in the spring.

According to Harrell, planting in southwest Louisiana started around the third week in March and all of the tillage happened right before planting. There was a short dry planting window then it started getting wet again which caused a lot of problems.

“One of the biggest problems we had was we had cold soils so we had poor germination problems. We had rice that would come up and then three weeks later more rice would come up, all because the soil temperatures were very low.”

And once the crop was flooded farmers faced three large rain events including Hurricane Barry which dumped three to six inches of rain across southwest Louisiana, thankfully much less than the more than twenty inches that had been predicted.

Harrell said that was followed by epidemic levels of fall smut “typically something we don’t have in southwest Louisiana which also affected yields.”

Harrell estimates yields this past growing season were down about 17 percent from 2018.