I certainly don’t have to tell you that the ag economy is struggling, and that last few years have been particularly brutal for rice farmers. We’ve been hit by unsustainably high input costs, low market prices, and a flood of subsidized rice from bad actors like India, Thailand, Vietnam, and China that steal our markets here and around the world. As a result, our acreage is down to levels we haven’t seen since the 1970s. I’ve talked with too many growers who couldn’t pencil out a rice crop after three years of no profit. So, believe me when I tell you I don’t say this lightly, but when I look at where the futures market is pointing right now, I see the first real reason for cautious optimism in some time.
Look at where rough rice futures have actually traded lately, and the signal is hard to miss. CBOT rough rice was sitting around $14.18 a hundredweight for September. January futures are over $15 and the March futures are close to $15.50 – hovering near an 18-month high.
USDA’s own numbers back that up. As of the July WASDE, the agency has the 2026/27 season-average farm price for long grain rice pegged at $13.50 per cwt, up from $10.40 the year before. That’s not a small revision, and it’s moved in one direction all year. That matters for a lot of reasons, including that it fundamentally changes the shape of our safety net.
Yes, a rice PLC payment will be triggered for the 2026 crop, but if the price levels we’re seeing on the board hold, that 2026 payment is going to come in meaningfully smaller than what we saw for 2025. On its face that might sound like bad news, but I don’t just look at what something is, I look at what it means.
A smaller payment driven by rising prices means farmers are less likely to bump up against payment limits. It also means we’re getting money from the marketplace – which is where we want it to come from.
And there’s a second-order effect I think we should be watching closely: if prices keep firming up the way the rice futures and USDA’s own forecasts both suggest, I expect we’ll see farmers who strayed from rice for 2026 return to our mighty crop for 2027. Any signal that pulls producers back toward planting rice instead of walking away from it is worth paying attention to.
A stronger price signal is excellent, but it doesn’t solve the deeper problems. We are still competing against foreign governments subsidizing production by upwards of 90 percent, input costs are still high, and we need meaningful trade fixes, including codifying the move of the PL-480 Food for Peace program to USDA to get bulk purchases moving again. As the new Chair of USA Rice, I’ll keep pushing these messages on Capitol Hill and with the Trump Administration, because a good futures market doesn’t fix an unlevel playing field.
But for the first time in a while, I can tell you 2027 is shaping up to look a little brighter than the past few years. For an industry that’s been bracing for the worst, that’s worth saying out loud.
The author is a Richland Parish rice farmer and was elected Chair of USA Rice on August 1, 2026 for a two-year term.
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