Arkansas Rice meets on state, federal updates

JONESBORO — Arkansas lawmakers provided a progress report on efforts to pass a delayed federal Farm Bill, state and federal agricultural legislative updates and priorities for upcoming sessions Thursday at the Arkansas Rice annual meeting in Jonesboro.

USA Rice Federation’s new president and Chief Executive Officer Peter Bachmann gave a status update for his first two months in the position. Bachmann took over in December after former CEO Betsy Ward retired; Bachmann was previously vice president of policy and government affairs at the federation and oversaw domestic and international trade policy issues.

“We’re looking at doing a few internal shufflings and trying to staff up,” Bachmann said.

“We brought on a new trade policy staffer in the last month and [are] looking at a few other positions where we can really augment our team. All of us are working on your behalf everyday to work towards increasing exports, increasing domestic sales, we’re working on domestic promotion, we are working on government affairs issues … we work closely with the folks at Arkansas Rice and with all of the mills that have government affairs folks to make sure that we are in alignment and we’re really working on your behalf.”

Arkansas rice acres harvested in 2022 were down 9%, production was down 12% and rice yields were down compared to 2021; U.S. rice production in 2022 was down 16% compared to 2021 levels, and drought in California contributed to declining overall U.S. rice production in 2021 and 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Arkansas rice production as of November 2023 was forecast to be 33% higher than 2022 levels, rice yields were up 140 pounds per acre compared to 2022 and producers expected to harvest 327,000 more acres than in 2022, according to USDA.

“Looking back at 2023, we had a lot of great successes — 2022 was a short crop for a lot of the U.S., so that impacted the beginning of 2023,” Bachmann said.

“We had really high input costs. Some of those have come down over the last year but they are still incredibly high. But we did see a recovery — to an extent — in prices, which really helped. We saw a lot of rice acreage go in last year, so that’s helped us become price competitive [with] Central America in Europe and in the Middle East. We’ve seen booming sales to Iraq the last two to three years.”

U.S. Sen. John Boozman, ranking member of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, aims to prioritize components of the Farm Bill that will provide a meaningful allocation increase aimed at reinforcing the “safety net” for farmers, specifically targeting reference prices and crop insurance, said Fitz Elder, U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee staff director for Boozman.

“When it comes to where things stand with the Farm Bill, we’ve had probably more than 300 meetings with Democratic staff in the Senate,” Elder said.

“We continue to believe that there is room for a deal and that we can put together a good deal that not only takes care of farmers, but also invests in trade — which is obviously very important to rice and agriculture in general — in research, our land grant system … and in addition, rural development. All of the communities you live in have infrastructure needs.”