LITTLE ROCK — Rice acreage is down this year in Arkansas.
The main question has been just how down that is and whether the amount of rice acreage would be below the one million acre threshold.
“That ship kind of long sailed on achieving one million acres. Obviously still a ton of debate around the topic. I’m currently crystal balling – that’s being generous – maybe Magic 8 balling the acres somewhere around 750,000,” said Jarrod Hardke, extension rice agronomist for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. “I’m not going to be surprised now if it’s just over 800,000 acres total, which is still certainly a dramatic reduction compared to last year’s 1.25 million acres… 35-40 percent reduction still at this point.”
The forecast for this week is dry and hot. Hardke said that’s not too bad at this point.
“We actually need that dry stretch. It doesn’t have to be a long one. But if we can get five to seven days of dry ground, we can make a lot of good things happen across a lot of acres,” he said. “Northeast Arkansas was kind of continually left hanging in not getting any early rains. The drought conditions just staying terrible. A little more rain in that region is still welcome.
“We’ve got March planted rice that really should have been fertilized a couple of weeks ago that hasn’t been. We’re already looking at yield loss and drag on those acres with a lot more into early-, mid-April coming to kind of our deadline now of maintaining full yield potential,” Hardke added. “Looking for dry ground to do that. In a lot of cases we’re not. A lot of discussions have been on spoon feeding nitrogen. Applying those small applications either into standing water or muddy ground whatever it is just to get something out there and have it either rained in or irrigated in to begin feeding the rice so we don’t start losing yields.”
