It is Sept. 11 and having already watched the rains generated by Hurricane Gordon sweep over the Arkansas’ roce crop, Jarrod Hardke stands beneath gray skies and misting clouds. The Arkansas Extension rice specialist sums up the last few weeks of the growing season: “The weather has been weird."
“For the most part, growers were just getting back to normal yesterday. Then, shockingly, today there’s bad weather coming up from the south. It’s sprinkling right now. Where did that come from? It wasn’t on any forecast I saw. Yet, it’s overcast and rain is falling in scattered areas from Memphis south. We thought this week would give us a break and we’d have a mix of cloudy mornings and sunshine.”
Even after the Gordon rains “our rice still largely looks okay. Obviously, the ground is wet and growers are just diving in to make harvest progress. The grain moisture level is not perfect, but it’s good enough to do that. So, we’re having to mud the crop out a bit more and that’s slowing things down.
“Some of the rice may not be down, but it’s sinking in places. There are some flattened spots in fields – mostly in the Prairie and south where some of the heavier rainfall was. Those spots weren’t caused by wind but are strictly due to the rain that just kept coming and weighed the plants down.”
Harvest
Overall, all of that means the state’s rice harvest is behind schedule.
“Mainly, that’s because of the weather,” says Hardke. “The crop hasn’t dried out, matured and cured out as fast as it should have because August was ‘flip-flopped.' By that I mean normally the first two weeks of August along with the last two weeks of July are the hottest 30 days of the year.
“This year, while it was still warm, we kind of got a cool down during that period. The last two weeks of August were the typical low-90s, very hot and humid weather that usually happens the first two weeks of the month. It worked in reverse.”
A dry spell would do wonders for morale.