A year of weather extremes — from a hard-frozen winter to a summer of drought to seemingly endless rains in the fall — took its toll on both rice and soybean, two of Arkansas’s top crops. Rice, however, emerged from the fray in notably better shape. “It’s probably been the most problematic year out of the last several,” says Jeremy ... Read More »

Here is a list of the 2019 University of Arkansas row crop production meetings scheduled as of Dec.7. For start times and location details, contact your county extension office. The meeting schedule will be posted at: https://www.uaex.edu/farm-ranch/crops-commercial-horticulture/ag-tech-calendar.aspx JANUARY Jan. 14 – WEINER – Craighead and Poinsett County rice, soybean. Jan. 15 – PRAIRIE COUNTY – Lonoke, Prairie and Pulaski rice ... Read More »

Researchers in Southeast Missouri State University’s Department of Agriculture along with the Missouri Rice Research and Merchandising Council have released for the 2019 season a new rice variety bred for southeast Missouri. Called MM17, it is a semi-dwarf, mid-season, medium-grain variety with excellent yield potential. It was developed by pedigree selection in Southeast’s Rice Research Greenhouse in Malden, Missouri, and ... Read More »

Chris and Judy Isbell of Humnoke, Arkansas, were named the 2018 Arkansas Farm Family of the Year at the recent Arkansas Farm Bureau’s annual convention. They will now compete with 10 southeastern state winners in the 2019 Swisher Sweets/Sunbelt Expo Southeastern Farmer of the Year program in Moultrie, Georgia, in October 2019. The Isbells say they are humbled to receive ... Read More »

This season, University of California Cooperative Extension rice farm advisers were contacted by several growers and pest control advisers to inspect plants suspected to be weedy rice. When the identification was difficult, farm advisers grew them in the greenhouse to determine if they were weedy or not. Of these, only five turned out to be weedy. The infestations in these fields ... Read More »

University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture rice research may lead to more sustainable crop production in the state and around the world. The quest for increased sustainability in agriculture and other industries includes examining greenhouse gases and how they’re generated. In the United States, only a small fraction of greenhouse gases are attributed to agriculture – 8.6 percent, according ... Read More »

In early February, growers and handlers will receive a ballot from the California Department of Food and Agriculture for the California Rice Commission referendum. Recipients are asked to take a moment to fill it out and return it. Every five years, the commission is required to go to both growers and handlers and reaffirm that the industry wishes to continue ... Read More »

RiceTec plans limited launch of FullPage herbicide-tolerant hybrids this season. • By Vicky Boyd, Editor • For the 2019 season, Alvin, Texas-based RiceTec plans a limited release of four long-grain hybrids developed to tolerate over-the-top applications of Preface and Postscript IMI herbicides from Adama Inc. In 2018, 11 growers from South Texas to Northeast Arkansas got a sneak peak of the ... Read More »

• By Kurt Guidry • When examining the market situation for a commodity and trying to project where that market may trend, it can often be useful to look back at similar years. When looking at the current rice market, the one thing that becomes apparent from a supply and demand numbers standpoint is that it is very similar to what ... Read More »

Record grain yields were last achieved in Louisiana during the 2014 growing season when we were blessed with very favorable weather conditions. Until 2018, each crop since 2014 had been successively lower yielding than the year before. Louisiana saw constant rainfall and cloudy conditions nearly the entire rice growth period in 2015. In 2016, record flooding occurred when more than ... Read More »