VP, Government Affairs
USA Rice
The passage of the American Relief Act of 2025, signed by President Joe Biden in December, is a hard-won victory for us. This measure will provide much needed economic assistance and disaster relief to rice farmers to alleviate the burden that low rice prices, increasing input costs, weather-related disasters, and other factors outside of our control have put on the industry in recent years. The package also included another extension of the 2018 Farm Bill through Sept. 30, 2025.
$10 billion in one-time, emergency payments will be allocated to eligible commodity producers, including somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million for rice growers, based on 2024 certified acres. Acres prevented from planting will receive a payment factored at 50 percent. More details are expected to be released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the coming months.
While this assistance comes as a great relief and is certainly appreciated, it is no substitute for a new farm bill with meaningful improvements to the farm safety net, including an adequate increase in the Price Loss Coverage program rice reference price—one that reflects accurate production costs and market conditions, enacted as early as possible to provide rice farmers with long-term certainty and security.
As we’ve said in the past, the 2018 Farm Bill was an evolution, not a revolution. It tweaked programs, but largely kept the safety net intact, status quo. But the world today is not the same as it was in 2018. Think about all the things that have changed in your operation and life over the last eight years: we’ve been through a global pandemic and inflation, we’ve seen wars rage in Europe and the Middle East, and we’ve seen the top rice exporter in the world, India, thumb its nose at international treaties and throttle global rice prices.
Band aids won’t cut it, and frankly, they cost the American taxpayer more in the long run. Ad hoc assistance—like the $250 million we helped secure for rice farmers for the 2022 crop year, and now this new emergency aid we fought so hard for last year—doesn’t make anyone whole. These payments may keep rice farmers farming, but we know everyone is getting tired of this cycle.
Farm Bills are intended to provide certainty and stability, and it is our sincere wish that a new, effective Farm Bill be enacted well before the current extension expires in September—and that’s what we’re working hard to accomplish in Washington.
I don’t want to come across as ungrateful. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to key champions in Congress who have fought for the rice industry’s interests, including Senator John Boozman, Speaker Mike Johnson, Representatives GT Thompson, Rick Crawford, Clay Higgins, Julia Letlow, and others. We also greatly appreciate the volunteer leaders within USA Rice who opened their farms and mills to Members of Congress and their staffs throughout the year, as well as those who dropped what they were doing and came to Washington to personally deliver messages about the real economic crisis in U.S. agriculture.
Together, we achieved great results for the rice industry in 2024. But ag policy in Washington is a bit like farming—there’s always something to do, and rarely enough time to do it.