Seventy percent of rice has emerged, behind both last year’s 80 percent, but ahead of the 57 percent five-year average.
The Prospective Plantings report from the National Agricultural Statistics Service said that Arkansas farmers had planned to plant 1.461 million acres of rice, with 1.32 million of those acres in long grain rice. Medium grain rice acres moved up 20 percent to 140,000 acres.
Rain, rain go away
Unfortunately, significant rainfall was expected again later this week and into the following week.
“It’s essentially raining our way right out of remaining rice progress,” Hardke said Tuesday. “There absolutely are guys that are going to continue to plant rice whenever that opportunity comes around, even if it's into the beginning of June.”
However, farmers are reaching a decision point — the cutoff for prevented planting coverage.
Prevented planting coverage helps farmers in the event they are unable to plant an insured crop by the final planting date or during the late planting period due to an insured cause of loss.
When adverse weather prevents planting, a payment is made to compensate for costs incurred by farmers in preparation for planting the crop.
Hardke said with the parade of nuisance rains, input costs and the challenges of cash flow, farmers will have to start penciling things out again — looking at their whole farm budget, figuring in continued low commodity prices and higher input costs, including fertilizer.
This year, “production costs were $100 an acre higher than they were in 2021,” he said. “But that’s a lie now, because in the last two weeks, urea prices have now soared.”
Hardke said with corn acres up across the United States, there has been an increase in nitrogen fertilizer demand.
“My understanding is most of the UAN — urea ammonium nitrate — fertilizer is gone,” he said. “Which means the fallback is to urea, which then means we're now competing with the Midwest for urea.”
Hardke said farmers are asking themselves, “‘Do I keep trying to plant some of this or punt on all of it? Do I take a partial crop insurance payment and then plant something later which would be soybeans? Or do they decide to walk away and take the prevented planting insurance payment and not plant anything else?’”
For rice growers, the final planting date is May 25, with a 15-day late-planting period that ends June 9. Rice put in the ground during the late-planting period is still insurable, but at a reduced coverage level.
“Rice, or any insured crop, planted in the late planting period will have its guarantee reduced by 1 percent per day,” said Hunter Biram, extension economist for the Division of Agriculture.
If a farmer planted five days after the final planting date and had purchased a yield protection policy at 75 percent, the yield guarantee would fall to 70 percent of expected yield. Similarly, for revenue protection, the revenue guarantee would fall to 70 percent of expected revenue.
Biram said that any crop planted beyond 15 days after the final planting date is uninsurable.
“At that point, assuming a farmer did not have the initial crop planted prior to the earliest planting date of April 1, the producer could still take a Prevented Planting payment,” Biram said. “They could also plant and insure a second crop.”
Source : uada.edu