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Almost three years ago, buyers in the rice industry were
getting requests from end users about sustainability and
U.S. rice farming sustainability practices. Today, sustainable
agriculture has become a buzzword, especially
with consumers.
To define what sustainability means for U.S. rice production and
ensure a long-term and viable future for American rice production, the
USA Rice Federation established a Sustainability
Task Force, chaired by Newport, Ark., rice
producer Jennifer James, to lead the way in developing
a rice industry sustainability program.
Other participants in the task force include producers,
millers, merchants and academic and
industry advisers.
“We want to be involved in defining sustainability
for the rice industry ourselves instead of
having someone define it for us,” James explains.
“We meet a lot via conference calls, but we also
came together in July in Dallas at the Business
Meetings. We’ll also get together again at the
USA Rice Outlook Conference in December.”
Field To Market Membership
One of the first things the task force accomplished
was becoming a member of Field to Market,
which is made up of a diverse group of members,
including commodity groups, food companies, grain buyers
and conservation and nature type groups, such as Ducks Unlimited and
the World Wildlife Fund. According to its Web site (www.fieldtomarket.org), Field to Market defines itself as “a diverse alliance
working to create opportunities across the agricultural supply chain
for continuous improvements in productivity, environmental quality
and human well being. The group provides collaborative leadership
that is engaged in industry-wide dialogue, grounded in science and
open to the full range of technology choices.”
“One of the main reasons we were interested in being a part of
Field to Market was so that rice could be included in the Field to
Market Fieldprint Calculator,” James says. “This is an online calculator
located on their Web site. It’s an educational tool that allows
farmers to input information about their fields, cropping practices, soil types and all sorts of agronomic and field work details.”
The calculator then shows them how their sustainability performances
in terms of land use, energy use, water use, soil loss and
greenhouse gas emissions compare with state and national averages.
“These results are not used for anyone else’s information but the
farmer’s,” James says. “It just lets the farmer know where he or she
stands. For example, if irrigation water usage is way out of line from
the average, then a farmer may want to consider
ways to make some improvements there, unless
it happened to be the result of a drought year.
Some of it is common sense, but we hope to see
any areas where we can make improvements as
an industry.”
Open Discussions Increase
Also, James says working with Field to Market
has helped to open up discussions between
farmers and end users to help farmers understand
what the end users need and help end users get a
much better understanding of how U.S. farmers
raise rice.
“There is a lot more science to it than what
they may have thought earlier,” she says. “Opening
up those lines of communications has been a
real plus for the industry as a whole.”
In addition to Field to Market, the Sustainability
Task Force is involved with the National Initiative for Sustainable
Agriculture, or NISA, which is comprised of producers who
are taking a whole farm view of sustainability. The task force has had
conversations with the Sustainability Consortium as well.
“As a task force, we are trying to stay involved in all of these conversations
to help move the definition of sustainability along,” James
says. “At this time, there doesn’t seem to be just one definition.”
The USA Rice Federation Sustainability Task Force has a working
definition of sustainability, which is as follows: Sustainable agriculture
meets current and future societal needs by enhancing agricultural
productivity; benefiting human health by supplying safe, affordable,
abundant and nutritious food; fostering the economic viability of
rural communities and contributing to environmental and
wildlife conservation.
“The definition seems to be evolving, and it depends on whose
viewpoint you are looking at, too,” James says. “For example, the food
companies may have a different objective than, say, the conservation
and nature groups.”
Developing Biodiversity Metric
One of the primary challenges that the task force faces is trying to
develop a biodiversity metric that will measure and define the good
that the rice industry is doing in the sustainability arena in such a
way that it can be plugged into a calculator or a report. There are a lot
of socio economic factors, such as jobs and quality of life in rural communities,
that are difficult to measure as well.
“Biodiversity is really important in rice,” James says. “We would
like to have something like this to show our end users that the rice
industry is doing a good job and have been for a long time. We just
haven’t actually used the word ‘sustainability’ to describe it.”
Although the task force is still developing its own biodiversity
metric for rice, the industry did do well in a recently released report
conducted by Field to Market. This report analyzes sustainability
trends on a national scale for U.S. rice, corn, cotton, potato, soybean
and wheat production from 1980-2011.
The latest results show that the rice industry is producing more
rice with fewer resources. Rice has demonstrated significant progress
in all measures of resource efficiency per hundredweight of rice produced
with decreases in land use (35 percent), soil erosion (34 percent),
irrigation water applied (53 percent), energy use (38 percent) and
greenhouse gas emissions (38 percent).
“The findings from this report demonstrate that rice producers
have made progress in producing more rice with fewer resources,”
James says. “As an industry, we are committed to increasing rice
production and yield to meet growing food demand, while at the
same time, preserving natural resources. This study highlights the
progress that has been made and serves as the basis for expanding
upon our knowledge of practices that can contribute to future resource
efficiency gains.”
MVPs – Most Valuable Practices
Some of the sustainable rice production practices (MVPs) that research, Extension and industry organization personnel develop and
promote and rice producers take advantage of include water management
and wildlife habitat, cultivar enhancement, N-ST*R soil
nitrogen (N) test for rice, no-till rotation, rice disease management and water-saving irrigation methods.
According to Dr. Steve Linscombe, Resident Coordinator, LSU
AgCenter Rice Research Station, Regional Director, Southwest
Region, “Cultivar enhancement is one of the fundamental aspects
of improving sustainability of rice production. If you can increase yield
per acre with a new rice cultivar, then this will lower the amount
needed of any production input from a per unit of grain produced
standpoint.
“Another way to look at it is that it takes a certain amount of fertilizer,
water, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, etc. to produce an
acre of rice regardless of yield,” he adds. “If a new variety will
increase yields by five percent with the same inputs, then the amount
of each of those inputs needed per pound of rice produced is lowered
a proportional amount, simply by growing the new variety. Also, if
a new cultivar has high levels of disease resistance such that a fungicide
is not necessary, this can be viewed as an improvement in
sustainable production.”
One fairly new tool – N-ST*R soil nitrogen test for rice – that
helps farmers achieve sustainable rice production was developed by
Dr. Trenton Roberts at the University of Arkansas and other rice
fertility scientists.
“The goal of N-ST*R is to predict the ‘correct’ N rate to maximize
rice yields and profitability,” Roberts says. “In order for rice production
to remain sustainable and profitable, we need to ensure that
we are maximizing the efficiency of our inputs – primarily N fertilizer,
which can represent as much as 30 percent of the total input
costs. As production costs continue to rise, we have to start farming
based on profitability and yield optimization. N-ST*R allows a producer
to apply a prescription N rate to each individual field rather than
an average or standard recommendation that often times may be higher than they need to maximize yield.
“Producers who use N-ST*R can ensure that they are: 1) realizing
the full potential of their N fertilizer, 2) achieving the best return to
their N investment and 3) avoiding the negative effects of excess N
fertilizer application such as increased disease pressure, increased
lodging and potential for off-site environmental impacts,” he explains.
“We see a wide range in recommendations from the samples that
have been processed over the last two years, but, on average, we
reduce the N rate by about 50 pounds of N per acre.
“In Arkansas, this means that roughly one-half of the time you
see a reduced N rate, and the other one-half of the time the rate is equal
to what you would normally apply. In Louisiana, we have seen that
N-ST*R reduces the N rate about 75 percent of the time.”
N-ST*R recommendations are currently being made for silt loam
and clay soils.
Staying On Track
As rice farmers continue to implement and adopt sustainable rice
production practices, the USA Rice Federation Sustainability Task
Force continues to carry out its mission, as James describes it, “to
develop a program to serve consumer interests in sustainably produced
rice products, as well as the rice industry’s interests in farm policy and
domestic and international promotion.
“The task force is still in an educational process to make sure that
we are steering rice industry sustainability in a favorable way,” James
says. “It’s been interesting and fun, and I think we have made progress.
We are moving in the right direction and want to stay involved in the
sustainability conversation.”
Contact Carroll Smith at (901) 767-4020 or csmith@onegrower.com.
New Waterbird Program Provides Widespread Benefits
The Waterbird Habitat Enhancement Program (WHEP) is a new effort developed in partnership with
the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and our conservation partners PRBO Conservation Science,
Audubon California and The Nature Conservancy. Offered in six of the rice-producing counties in
the Sacramento Valley, the NRCS received nearly 165 applications from rice farmers. The NRCS has
committed nearly $7 million to support the 2012 program thus far. They funded 100 percent of the highly
ranked applications and some 40 percent of the medium ranked proposals – approximately 125 contracts
overall covering about 45,000 acres of rice. This builds upon the successful 2011 pilot program in
which $2.7 million was invested across some 70 contracts on approximately 27,000 acres.
WHEP primarily focuses on specific practices that fit well with rice cultivation and are beneficial to a variety
of bird species and other wildlife, including:
• Promoting wildlife-friendly straw management practices and returning boards back into the rice boxes
after harvest to hold more rainwater.
• Enhancements of nesting habitat by modifying rice check berms and creating nesting islands.
• Enhancing duration and types of fall and early spring habitat created when intentionally flooding fields
in the winter season.
• Installing nesting and roost structures for certain non-waterbird species such as hawks, eagles and owls.
• A suite of other traditional conservation practices offered by NRCS for rice and other crop types. Thank
you to our primary conservation partners involved in the development of this exciting new conservation
program that fits so well with rice farming on working lands. Without the funding and expertise provided
by NRCS, this opportunity would not be possible. The expertise of Audubon and PRBO to provide technical
assistance to NRCS and monitoring of the conservation practices has been invaluable to supporting
implementation and documenting results.
– By Paul Buttner
Black-necked Stilt Reprinted with permission from the California Rice Commission
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