By Peter Hecht, Ag Alert
As California agriculture braves a roller coaster of climate extremes, one sector—rice— faced a dramatic fall and rise in production in back-to-back years.
A year ago, statewide rice acreage plummeted by 50% amid withering drought conditions, with some growers in the Sacramento Valley fallowing 100% of their fields. This year, drenched by atmospheric storms, state rice farmers were able to double their planted acreage.
Tim Johnson, president and CEO of the California Rice Commission, said the sector is working to secure a sustainable farming footprint with less vulnerability to climate extremes.
“I think rice producers, not unlike the rest of agriculture, are starting to wrap our arms around what the impacts of climate variability are going to be,” Johnson said in an interview with Ag Alert® at last week’s annual conference of the California Association of Pest Control Advisors in Reno. “We have gone from the worst drought…to record rainfall that recovered everything back to normal. And then you’re looking at an El Niño (weather pattern) next year. What does that mean?
“That may mean too much water and some impacts on agriculture. How do you deal with that variability?”
Johnson spoke to conference attendees about navigating threats to rice crops that include pests and weeds. He also talked about the sector’s role in maintaining critical rice land as habitat for juvenile salmon. He noted contributions of growers who partnered with the California Department of Water Resources during the drought to pump groundwater to maintain habitat on the Pacific Flyway for millions of ducks, geese and other waterfowl.
The flyway effort was supported by $10 million in grant funds from DWR to help participating farmers offset costs of seasonal pumping on some idled fields. Johnson told the CAPCA audience that increasing similar public investments can help farmers weather dry years and keep more fields in production while protecting more critical habitat.
Such partnerships can help safeguard rice acreage, keeping it from being converted to other uses, he said.
“It is that footprint, that presence on the landscape of rice lands in production that the state of California, that the federal government are going to need, so that we can continue to provide and enhance those environmental benefits and to make sure that our rural communities can continue to be viable,” Johnson told the conference.
While rice plantings have rebounded, Johnson noted in the interview that impacts linger from three years of drought.
He said the fallowing of fields worsened labor shortages for rice growers this year because many agricultural employees “couldn’t wait the whole 12-month cycle to be able to come back and work on rice farms. They found other jobs.”
While rice farmers were generally insured against crop losses, Johnson said, “they’re still realizing the impacts of the drought. Crop insurance doesn’t make you whole, but what it does is it allows you to fight for another day.”
In 2023 Farm Bill discussions, rice farmers continue to advocate for building national insurance programs to cover rice support industries that endured significant losses during the drought, Johnson said.
“One of the things we saw last year out of crop insurance is that we really need that same kind of coverage for our allied businesses—our mills, our dryers, our ag-chem folks, our applicators,” Johnson said. “In the next five years, you’re going to see us undertake an initiative with some like-minded commodity groups nationally to say, ‘How can we do an indemnity program, a crop insurance program, if you will, for everybody else?’”
He said safeguarding those support businesses is a component of adjusting to climate challenges. “We really need to think about the tools that we need to be able to manage a more volatile production climate,” Johnson said.
At the CAPCA conference, he spoke about challenges and breakthroughs in managing persistant rice pests and threats. He cited a partnership with University of California researchers to track armyworm moth flights and alert growers and pest control advisors of infestations of larvae that mature to defoliate rice plants.
Rice producers this year received full U.S. Environmental Protection Agency registration to use the insecticide Intrepid 2F from Corteva Agriscience to help manage armyworms.
But Johnson said rice farmers are now “spending an awful lot of focus and time” battling seven different biotypes of weedy rice, an herbicide-resistant weed that competes with rice in fields and diminishes yields. Another stubborn threat, water grass, endangers crops because it can “outcompete the rice for nutrients, water and sunlight,” he said.
Johnson said treatment strategies must also protect habitat closely connected to rice farming.
That theme was echoed by conference attendee Daniel Abruzzini, western region marketing director and a rice specialist for Corteva Agriscience. The firm partners with growers on a project to protect insects that are nutrients for juvenile salmon. Abruzzini said rice pest management treatments must be safe “from the standpoint of beneficial insects and aquatic life.”
Johnson told the conference that 230 species use rice fields as habitat. He said partnerships that support rice growers who sustain that habitat can also sustain rice production. He said safeguarding the state’s “rice footprint” will provide a benefit to California “that is maybe even significantly more than that value of the crop that we produce every year.”
(Peter Hecht is chief editor of publications for the California Farm Bureau. He may be contacted at phecht@cfbf.com.)
