Arkansas farmers rush to harvest before Tropical Storm Francine

Little Rock, Arkansas – Ahead of Tropical Storm Francine’s impending arrival from the Gulf, farmers around Arkansas are racing to finish harvesting their crops.

The rice fields in the state are currently ripe for harvest, but they are especially vulnerable to the approaching storm.

According to Rice Extension Agronomist Jarrod Hardke of the University of Arkansas System’s Division of Agriculture, “When that rice goes down flat and you start saying we’re going to lose 10 bushels an acre, we’re going to lose more in quality, in the value of it, we’re going to double those production costs, so you start jumping to easily $50- to $100-an-acre losses.”

When rice reaches maturity, it becomes weaker and cannot handle heavy rain or wind, which could cause harvests to collapse.

The remaining grain that has been blown down would take twice as long to harvest and would lose quality in addition to possible yield loss.

Farmers in the Delta have been harvesting quickly since Monday in an attempt to prevent potentially severe losses, but they might not be able to gather all of their crops before the storm arrives.

Scott Mitchell, a farmer from Lonoke, was working diligently today to gather his rice crop and was only able to talk to us over the phone as he was confined to his combine harvester.

Hurricanes are disliked by rice farmers. Our goal is to finish this rice before the storm. We won’t make it through, but we’ll get what’s ready, so it seems like we’ll have around two days,” Mitchell said.

He and the other farmers are hoping that the storm moves away from Arkansas and to the east.
“But right now, still that potential is for the majority of the rice growing area for us to get three to four inches of rain and 40, 50-mile-an-hour winds,” Hardke said.

All of this is poor news for an industry that has already been having trouble, with farmers all over the nation finding it difficult to break even because they frequently invest more money in their crops than they get in return.

“We were already in a position where some of these crops were going to struggle to break even—if that were even possible—before the storm came through…we’d just start further reducing the price we’re going to receive for rice, for soybean, for cotton—again, due to quality loss alone and everything in an already very questionable year in terms of how many [farmers] may we potentially not have able to farm next year due to the outcomes of this season,” Hardke said.

“This is absolutely not what we needed at this point in time.”

“We’re going to say our prayers and work hard. It has been effective for a while, so perhaps it will continue to be effective “said Mitchell. “You’re not in control of the weather, God is, and we pray he’ll spare us a hurricane.”

About 40% of Arkansas’s rice crop was still unharvested as of Tuesday.