A group of rice millers and merchants spent time visiting with officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs mission area, the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), and the Surface Transportation Board (STB) as part of USA Rice’s fly-in this week.
Read MoreThe U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today previewed plans to provide up to $250 million in assistance to rice farmers and what steps they can take to be prepared to sign up when the program is released later this spring. USDA is sharing information early so producers can prepare for program signup, which will include a pre-filled application in an effort to simplify and streamline the application process.
Read MoreAfter more than a decade of meeting up the road in Jennings, the Louisiana Rice Council (LARC) and the Louisiana Rice Growers Association (LARGA) returned here to the International Rice Festival Building to hold their annual business meetings, talk about the coming year, and hear industry reports.
Read MoreIf we have a “normal” planting year in terms of acreage, about half of the fields being planted to rice will have been fallowed the previous year. We have been studying yield potential and nitrogen (N) management in fallowed vs. continuous rice for the past couple of years. Here is some of what we have found.
Read MoreAn LSU AgCenter scientist has been awarded a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture to improve sustainability and profitability of rice farming through research innovations that advance climate-resilient crops.
Read MoreConservation and rice farming have always gone together, especially here at Live Oak Farm in Vermilion Parish. The farm’s owners, the Godchaux family, have been an integral part of the Louisiana and U.S. rice industries for multiple generations as original founders of Riviana Foods. The family continues to produce rice on this picturesque property of mossy covered oaks and prairie marshland south of Abbeville, located along the Vermilion River, just north of the Intracoastal Waterway.
Read MoreAl Awees, the private company that took over much of the food purchasing for the government of Iraq in 2021, made two purchases of 44,000 metric tons each of U.S. rice as the 2022 calendar year ended.
The total of 88,000 metric tons may not seem like much given that U.S. rice exports are expected to total around 3 million metric tons in the 2022-23 marketing year, but the symbolism may be more important than the actual amount.
Read MoreThe 26th Annual Conservation Systems Cotton & Rice Conference (Con-Till) was held here this week. The conference first convened in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1998. Initially the meeting focused on conservation related to rice and cotton production but has expanded to include varied production topics while adding corn, soybeans, irrigation, precision ag, and regenerative ag presentations.
Read MoreIt’s decision-making time for Louisiana rice producers, and researchers at the LSU AgCenter offer a bevy of tools to help them figure out what, when and where to plant.
AgCenter extension agents and faculty members hosted rice production meetings throughout the state’s southwest region including Welsh on Jan. 3, Vidrine on Jan. 4, Crowley on Jan. 5 and Abbeville on Jan. 10.
Read MoreLouisiana’s J.T. Meleck Distillers now offers its brand of rice whiskey throughout the year, including a single-barrel cask strength option for select retailers in its home state.
Read MoreKellogg ‘s InGrained™, a five-year partnership with Lower Mississippi River Basin rice farmers to help reduce their climate impact, is reporting early positive results. During the pilot year of the program, InGrained helped farmers implement climate-smart irrigation practices that achieved a reduction of more than 1,600 metric tons of greenhouse gases1 – the equivalent of taking more than 345 gasoline-powered cars off the road for one year.2
Read MoreUSDA’s Economic Research Service has reduced its forecast of U.S. rice exports for the 2022-2023 marketing year by 2.0 million hundredweight to 69.0 million hundredweight, the lowest since 1991-92.
The revision, which was announced during the USA Rice Outlook Conference in Austin, Texas, is expected to add to the economic woes faced by U.S. rice producers due to the ongoing low rice prices and high input costs that occurred in 2022.
Read MoreGoodyear unveiled a tire with 90 percent sustainable materials at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last week.
The new tire, which has passed all regulatory and internal tests for road use, makes use of sustainable products such as soybean oil, rice husks, and pine resin, in place of standard compounds.
Read MoreTim Walker may not be from Louisiana, but he certainly has some vested interests in the Pelican State’s rice industry. As general manager of HorizonAg, his company has championed the Clearfield, then, subsequently, the Provisia systems that have proven to be vital to Louisiana’s rice industry. He touted these offerings from the HorizonAg display booth at the 2022 U.S.A. Rice Outlook Conference held Dec. 7-9.
Read More5th generation Louisiana rice farmers, JT Meleck, are truly farm-to-glass as they create a distinctly American Rice Whiskey.
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