EASTERN ARKANSAS — Rice acreage is very low this year.
The main question was the number of acres that rice would have and whether it 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.”
Hardke said the weather has been a problem.
“Most of what we dealt with this spring through most of planting was the drought conditions. We were overly dry and begging for a rain,” he said. “That actually led to a lot of very erratic stands and emergence, very uneven from that lack of moisture. Some seeds would germinate, others wouldn’t or it would be a week or more later that they would. You would have three- and four-leaf rice and rice just emerging. Then it becomes how do we manage this. Not all herbicides are safe at all stages and we need to flush to get some dry seed into the ground to germinate. Quite a nightmare through that window.
“That really got us through the majority of planting dealing with that drought and begging for an occasional shower, or at least humidity to be high enough to kind of dampen the ground with a little moisture,” Hardke added. “Now, we’ve kind of taken the turn over the past two weeks, we’re going to sit here and make up for lost time. When we look at at least the northeast corridor for the last couple of weeks, five or six days of the past two weeks have had measurable rainfall. Some have reported totals up to five inches in five days up to one point.
“As you look south from there, there have been some even bigger events at times that preceded the past 10 days, two weeks,” he continued. “Now, believe it or not, we’re looking for a little bit of a dry spell because this has begun to put us at odds with some of our timing to apply pre-flood nitrogen on time and then get the rice flooded to clean up herbicide. We’re actually getting late on some rice dangerously so and staring at some yield loss potential already now from being too late.”
Hardke said it has been since the 1970’s since Arkansas rice has fallen below the one million acre threshold. The anticipated dry weather is welcome.
“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 here this week 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 yield.”
