Yet another round of severe weather is delaying Arkansas farmers planting their crops. Historic levels of rain this spring have challenged rice farmers in particular.

Crop-destroying weather has made this a fraught planting season for Arkansas farmers, and it doesn't look to be over yet.

"Problems that we have to address are all the damage that we had from the flooding and fixing the returning the fields back to precision level, repairing roads, repairing ditches and tiles, and restoring drainage on the fields," Jackson County rice farmer Jeff Rutledge told KATV.

Arkansas farmers have either lost crops to weather or missed critical planting windows because of it, and it's coming down to the wire for rice farmers.

The last day of the rice-planting season is next Sunday, after which there is a 15-day late-planting period ending on June 9th. Rice farmers, feeling the pressure to minimize losses in a season where no one is expected to break even, may try to get in one last crop, but that comes with a caveat.

"Your crop insurance coverage declines by one percent per day because it's in that late window declining expected results," said Jarrod Hardke, rice extension agronomist at the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.

Soybean, however, can be planted past that date, so many farmers may try to minimize losses by planting it instead.

"What's going to lose me less money at this point? And that can shift to soybean at this point, as we enter this window, that the high input cost of rice and less confidence they can make the yield needed," Hardke told KATV.

But breaking the cycle of crop rotation by pivoting from rice to soybean doesn't come without its own challenges, and could impact crops for several years to come.

"75, 80 percent of our rice crop is rotated with soybean. So, anytime we have to go off script and not do what we need, now we've gotten into two consecutive years of the same crop potentially, and there are always issues with that, whether it be pests, diseases, things like that that favor that particular crop," Hardke said.

"That balance works, but once we get shifted off of it, it's hard to return to it. Now, we have a recurring problem each year." he said.

Unless farmers have adequate insurance to cover crops destroyed or unplanted due to weather, they may have to take that option. And they'll need every day they can get to plant in the next few weeks.

Source - https://katv.com