Then We Will Fight in the Shade

By Michael Klein

There are moments in any industry’s history when the headwinds stop feeling temporary. When you’ve absorbed enough hits that the question stops being “when does this get better?” and starts being something harder to say out loud.

We know some of you are at that place right now.

The facts are brutal:  Import pressure that isn’t letting up. Policy wins that looked like turning points have been dulled. Input costs that don’t bend while prices do. Fields that your family has farmed for generations are suddenly the subject of conversations you never expected to be having – about whether to plant again next year, about what the land might be worth, about what comes next.

This is one of the hardest stretches American rice farmers have faced in a long time. And we’re not going to insult you be offering “hopium.”

What we will tell you is this: we are in your corner. Not in the way that sounds good in a press release or at a media event. In the way that means showing up when it’s uncomfortable, fighting battles that don’t have guaranteed outcomes, and refusing to accept the slow erosion of an industry that feeds people, sustains communities, and represents something genuine about what American agriculture can be.

The U.S. rice industry will not fail. We will not allow it.

Rice country has weathered floods and droughts, market collapses and trade wars, bad policy and bad luck. The families in this industry have a specific kind of toughness that doesn’t come from avoiding hard times. It comes from enduring them, adapting, and planting again anyway.

The title of this piece comes from history. In 480 BC, a force of roughly three hundred Spartan soldiers and a few thousand allies made a stand at Thermopylae against a Persian army of more than 120,000. A Persian general told a Spartan soldier, “our archers are so many, our arrows will blot out the sun.” Unbowed, the Spartan, Dienekes, replied, “Then we will fight in the shade.”

Dienekes and his fellow Spartans fell. But Greece did not.

Not everyone reading this today will be planting rice next year. That is a painful truth, and we won’t look away from it.

If that’s where you are, know that your contribution to this industry means everything

The years you put in, the land you stewarded, the community you sustained, the family you raised, and the billions around the world you helped feed; that work is woven into the foundation of everything this industry is and everything it will become. It does not diminish because circumstances forced a change. It endures.

For those who are staying, know that the fight is being waged on every front we can open. Legislative, regulatory, economic, and now at the grocery store shelf. Every tool available is being used.

You didn’t build something this important to watch it quietly disappear. Neither did we.

We will fight in the shade together.

By Michael Klein

The author is vice president of communications and strategic development for USA Rice