February 18, 2026 • 29 mins
Southern agriculture operates in a very different environment than the Midwest — different crops, different water management systems, different land structures, and different production risks. But there are powerful lessons for commercial grain producers everywhere.
In this episode of the Purdue Commercial AgCast, we launch a new mini-series: Lessons From the Delta. After traveling to Arkansas and the Mississippi Delta region, Chad Fiechter and Todd Kuethe share what stood out most about crop diversity, irrigation intensity, farm structure, and regional economics.
From rice and cotton production to groundwater dependence and large-scale irrigation systems, this discussion explores how southern farmers manage risk differently than Midwest corn and soybean producers. The episode also highlights how climate, infrastructure, export access, and conservation programs shape long-term farm strategy in the Delta.
While production practices may differ, the business questions are familiar: • How do you manage tight margins? • How do you think about long-term water access? • What does scale look like in a different production system? • And what can Midwest farmers learn from a region built around irrigation?
This episode sets the stage for upcoming interviews with producers, researchers, Extension leaders, and conservation organizations across the Delta region.
We’ll also be sharing additional video clips and behind-the-scenes content from the trip on our YouTube channel throughout the series.
Subscribe to the Purdue Commercial AgCast so you don’t miss upcoming episodes in the Lessons From the Delta series.
For more farm management resources, visit: 👉 https://purdue.ag/commercialag
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#Purdue #FarmManagement #AgEconomy #Agriculture #Irrigation #Rice #Cotton
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(00:00):
Even somebody that farms, corn orsoybeans, you come into rice, there's
a lot of work, like you got levees topull, you got irrigation to manage.
It's a lot more complex.
But rice on rice helps minimizesome of that overhead over time.
But in two pockets in Arkansas wherewe have cones of depression, where I
think there are five rice farmers inArkansas at the end of the 19th century.
(00:23):
And then of course now we growanywhere between 1.3 and 1.5
million acres of rice every year.
50 some percent of the nation's rice
Whoa.
Wow.
50% of the country'srice is produced here.
But those two kinds of depressionare where the original rice
farms were in Arkansas, the GrandPrairie Region Catch River Valley.
So a lot of new water managementpractices are being adopted.
(00:43):
You're seeing some of therice on rice dissipate.
By cones of depression he meansthe groundwater is becoming
further and further down.
There's less and less of it.
It's further down.
It's more costly to pump.
If everybody's putting straws inthe pond and sucking it up, then
it's eventually gonna go dry.
Who's whose straw goes dry firstdepends on where you're at.
And so it's a true public goods problem.
(01:10):
Welcome to the Purdue Commercial AgCast.
This is Chad Fiechter.
And Todd and I had mentioned in aprevious episode that we had this project
last summer where we spent some timein the Mississippi Delta, specifically
in Arkansas, talking with farmers,advisors, researchers and industry
leaders about what they're seeing.
What's working, what's changing,and what might be surprising
to Midwestern grain farmers.
(01:32):
This special series, Lessons fromthe Delta, is what we learned.
We've broken it up into severalepisodes and what you'll hear is a
lot of conversations that we had aswe were driving around the Delta.
Some of 'em are in the truck, infields, conversations that popped up
about managing risk, the challengesaround water, labor, and capital, in
ways that look different than whatwe're familiar with in the Midwest.
(01:54):
Our goal isn't to compare the two regionsbut it's to ask questions where we can
try to learn a little bit more about howproduction systems are built when the
constraints are a little bit different.
What we saw challenges conceptions ofMidwestern farming, specifically around
irrigation and the risk that's managed.
So this is episode One.
(02:17):
As a farm kid.
We are the Eastern Corn Belt.
I saw that there's nuances to the placethat I farm that are really specific.
So don't lump me in with the centralIllinois folks or the Iowa folks.
I'm an Eastern Corn Belt guy, sodon't, don't like, don't characterize
me with the rest of those guys.
Not because there's anything wrong.
It's just like, no, no.
My challenges are differentthan everybody else.
(02:38):
So in the back of my mind,there's been these big places
that I have fascinations in.
So like Brazil is one that somedayI need a pilgrimage to Brazil to
understand what is Brazil like,what is Argentina like, right?
Another place would be Ukraine.
Within the United States, one ofthose being the Mississippi Delta.
And so there's a lot about theMississippi Delta that I don't know,
(03:00):
but we talk about it broadly ag circles,they grow corn and soybeans, right?
Different culture, different ideas.
So where we went is into theMississippi Delta in Arkansas.
Primarily visited a bunch ofthings related to rice production.
So farms, extension personnel, uh,farmland investors in Arkansas.
(03:25):
We went to a couple ofresearch institutes.
So, we talked to not just economists,we talked mostly to physical scientists
that study irrigation, pest management.
Uh, we had a really nice conversationwith a agricultural engineer.
So the kind of technology formoving water was a big part of that
conversation, but also the technologyof dealing with pests or things I
think are kind of universal to farming.
(03:48):
But the things that are uniqueabout the commodities they produce
and where they produce them.
Okay, so you're, you were sort of,it was this mythical place to you
that you wanted to learn more about?
No.
no.
100%. We got to taking this tripbecause we have these great friends.
Who are willing to, to take us around.
So we have these two friendswho we do research with them.
(04:09):
So they work for a company calledAcres is where Aaron works and
a company called Acre Trader.
And they were like, you guysshould come see the delta sometime.
And you were like, I'm on it.
You tell us.
Let's find the dates.
And then Aaron, who was one of ourhosts, was also, he's the one that
set up this great itinerary for us.
But he was like, we need some dates.
You could do these dates, youcould do these other dates, which
(04:30):
to tease some of the things weexperienced had to do with mosquitoes.
100%.
If you go too early, there's not gonnabe rice in the ground to look at.
We don't wanna go in the winterunless you want hunt ducks.
So we had a, a good host that would saylike, oh, we can show you this stuff.
We went to some of their farmsthat their investment farm owns.
But Aaron was also an extensioneconomist, at the University of
(04:51):
Arkansas and at Arkansas State.
So he had all the connectionsto the extension folks, but
also one of his former studentsnow works at Ducks Unlimited.
And he went around with us and talkedto us about the interface between
rice production and the naturalenvironment, particularly ducks.
So duck hunting is a big thing.
We're gonna insert some clips fromAaron and Colson giving us a little
more explanation of what the MississippiDelta is, the scale of rice production,
(05:15):
how flat the train is, and thisidea that they do precision leveling
to help manage rice production.
Can you tell us a littlebit about who you are?
Aaron Shew, I was a professorof agricultural economics at
University of Arkansas, and Istudied a lot of different crops.
Mostly worked in productioneconomics, my main crop of
(05:36):
interest was rice being Arkansas.
So I spent the better part of about 10years, between graduate school and being a
professor studying the economics of rice.
Now I work at a software companycalled Acres and we focus on valuation
and buying and selling of land.
(05:57):
And Colson works at acompany called Acre Trader.
Yes, I work at Acre Trader, which isa, we're a land investment company,
based outta Fayetteville, Arkansas.
That is the sister company to Acres.
And we focus on investing inproductive agricultural ground.
We have a base of retail investorsthat invest in our platform.
(06:18):
And we buy and make long-terminvestments in farm ground throughout
the U.S. So we own quite a fewrice, soybean, cotton, corn farms
in the Delta, where we are today.
We're about to go lookat two of those farms.
And then we own ground in the Southeast,all throughout the Midwest, and quite
a bit in the Pacific Northwest as well.
(06:39):
What defines the delta in your mind?
There's a huge history in the, themid south Mississippi River Delta,
the Mississippi River Alluvial Plane.
The MAP, is the acronym that's often orthe MRVA for the Mississippi River Valley.
Um, and that's generally gonna startin Cairo, Illinois and go all the
(07:02):
way south to where the MississippiRiver meets the Gulf of Mexico.
Obviously geographical significanceto that, though the river itself
widens out, you get a very uniqueterrain, it's flat, right, compared
to once you get to Cairo, Illinois.
So Cairo is where the confluence ofthe Ohio and Mississippi rivers are.
(07:24):
So we're not far from Memphis, Tennessee.
So in Arkansas, how farwest of the river can I be?
And you still consider it the delta?
Probably probably about Searcy, Arkansas.
Think of it like it'sroughly, it's third eastern.
Third.
Yeah.
Eastern.
Eastern.
Third, third, Little, Little Rock east.
So put a dart in the middle of thestate, move, you know, directly east,
(07:49):
about 40 miles and you're in the Delta.
I study farmland markets and peoplethat were interested in investing
farmland as a, a like investmentasset for for a while really hot on
the
Delta.
And the argument they were
making
is you can plant
three
four different
commodities and
(08:09):
and you can let the annual variation inthe economics, costs and returns of those
commodities dictate what you do as opposed
to
the corn belt where we have two,maybe three commodities that
you could do with that land.
And so if farmers here plant anything.
They didn't to worryabout making money, right?
They just plant 'causethat's they like do.
They would still plant rice, thatrice still what they'd prefer to do?
(08:32):
So broadly of the Deltaa geographic region.
That thesis holds true, maybe that'sa reason that historically land
stable other parts of the country.
But a farm to farm basis, I don'tthink that, there's not that much
(08:54):
crop optionality, in my opinion.
So like these heavy soils,you're typically confined a
growing rice and soybeans.
You have optionality cotton andcorn, you're not gonna do either.
You're pretty much pretty stuckwith two, two crops there.
Then you move to lighter sandiersoils, most of those guys
(09:17):
are corn, cotton, soybeans.
But but the switching costs between beingsomebody grows cotton and somebody that
doesn't cotton is incredibly expensive.
So in order to grow cotton, yougotta buy a cotton picker, and
that costs 600,000 plus probably.
So guys are typicallymarried to growing cotton.
(09:39):
Guys who grow rice, rice,and it's that easy to switch.
So on a farm to farm basisthat necessarily holds true.
I'd say the difference between hereand Midwest is a lot of guys here
are operating thousands, if not of
thousands
acres, and they're spread over pretty widegeography, so they moving equipment a lot.
(10:00):
Equipment's dispersed around.
More than I see guys Midwest.
Talk about scale.
'cause that's, that's different.
What do what do you mean by that?
Like, geographically dispersed.
They grow a lot in one area or?
Talk about the farmers that are here.
Both and.
There farmers obviously with less thana few thousand acres, but I mean, most
(10:27):
people that are farming rice farmingmultiple thousands of acres at least.
And they're the bigger operators,uh, are even into the, into
the 15 to 25,000 acre range.
So yeah, just to that point, youbasically move your equipment all
year, field to field, and alwayssomething you need your equipment for.
(10:50):
What's the, what's the, likemachinery bottleneck in rice?
Like is it combine capacity, isit ability to get it sprayed?
Is it planting?
I don't know that it's so much equipment.
As it is weather.
Feel like weather is probably the biggest
Maybe levees and dirt work.
If anything.
(11:10):
Levees and dirt work.
Because that, because you have to dothat before you plant, so you got that.
A lot of rice farmers burn stubble.
I think research is really mixed,but rice straw has really high silica
content and I'm not a soil scientist,uh, by any means, but I think there's
(11:30):
debate among soil scientists even that,hey if you till in that high silica
straw, it doesn't break down welland it inhibit nitrogen other uptake.
It's pretty thick.
I mean, if go through a a rice cut, lotof, of organic matter, right, leftover.
More than like a wheat field?
You been Yeah.
Okay.
(11:50):
Yeah.
More than that.
And it doesn't break down like wheatstubble does because of the silica in it.
And so people will burn it off.
Um,
And do you mean like burn, likefire or burn, like chemical?
No, burn fire.
Yeah And so like, I mean,it's, they're big fires.
And what would be the other, like, likeyou would try to harvest that biomass
(12:11):
and do something with it, or what, whatelse, what other options do you have?
I'm not sure that the research issuper solid that it won't break down,
and there are some really innovative,uh, that are experimenting with other,
otherwise they're trying to till itplanning and doing experiments on
yield
to see how much changes.
So turning your irrigation off.
(12:31):
So let's through how irrigation works.
Mm-hmm.
So generally, is it coming from aspring or like a, it's all groundwater.
I mean, of course years, thisyear we get enough rain that it'll
stay flooded until early July.
Um, and you got, you're trying tokeep it roughly around four inches.
Could be, could be less at sometimes.
(12:53):
And there's some methods thatare increasingly adopted, like
alternating, wetting and drying.
So they'll flood it up for awhile and then let it drain
back down over a few weeks.
Save water.
Improves greenhouse gasemissions, things of that nature.
But when they do irrigate, it's generallygroundwater from the alluvial aquifer.
So hundreds of feet under us big aquifers.
(13:16):
Uh, they'll pump it up.
In pump like this and spill out And thenthey'll often pipes that run out to risers
where you can see there's a levee there.
There's kind of a raisedto section off the field.
That's how they help manage thewater depth across a varied terrain.
Uh, or in our case here, it's, it'sactually, uh, been leveled so that it's
(13:37):
a very specific, uh, depth everywhere.
But they'll have risers evenrunning thousands of feet.
So even though, we're probably, it's along way over there, it's like a mile
across these fields, and you could haverisers where this pump actually pumps
water underground through a pipe andit rises and dumps out in that field.
What's that cost like per acre?
(13:58):
And how often do youhave do it, do you know?
So it all depends on the level,how unlevel it was before.
So on this farm.
I think this farm, we spent somewherebetween four and $500,000 on
leveling to do three to 400 acres.
(14:18):
Okay.
Okay?
So a thousand, 1500 bucks an acre.
Um, and you don't have to do it often,but you do have to true it up sometimes.
So over time, dirt moves around,you have to come in and clean it
up a little bit, but that $1,500 anacre cost is a one time expenditure.
So, so how level are we talking?
Is this like.
Tennis court level, or we gota couple inches of variation.
(14:42):
So this side of the road, we didn'tcome in a level, it was already done
as already what we'd call graded.
So it's the whole fieldslopes a certain direction.
Typically at like a, I don'tthey call it at a 10th.
Yeah.
I don't know what a 10th,what metric that is.
Okay.
very light.
It's like
don't even know, a hundredfeet or something like
(15:02):
So like, like a less than like a railroad.
moves, right?
it looks very flat.
No, it looks super flat.
It all looks like way
On this side of the road.
We came in and precision leveled it.
So the entire field isat the same elevation.
Oh, and
The reason for that is that like thepremier way to grow rice, and we'll
get back to the pumping water questionin a second with this, but like the
(15:22):
premier way to grow rice is rice on rice.
So, um, just in terms of managinga field and an operation, you know,
when, generally when even somebodythat farms, say they have a background
in farming, corn or soybeans, um.
You come into rice, there's a lotof work, like you got levees to
pull, you got irrigation to manage.
(15:44):
It's a lot more complex.
All of your herbicides change, right?
Because a lot of herbicidesare not sprayed in rice.
They're water.
Deployed.
Oh,
Oh.
Cool
So there's a lot of, like, you have toknow a lot and it's often a lot more work.
I mean, the new technologies in riceare like, Hey, how do we automate
the irrigation coming on and off?
You know?
'cause I don't wanna get up at 2:00 AMand have to drive 10 miles to my field.
(16:07):
Um, but rice on rice helps minimizesome of that overhead, right?
Uh, over time, but in someplaces, not here, but it, there
are two pockets in Arkansas.
Where we have cones of depression, wherewe've been, you know, rice has been ar
or I think there are five rice farmers inArkansas at the end of the 19th century.
And then of course now we have, we grow,I don't know, anywhere between 1.3 and
(16:32):
1.5 million acres of rice every year.
50 some percent of the nation's rice
Whoa.
Wow.
50% of the country'srice is produced here.
But those two kinds of depression.
You know, are often, that's where theoriginal rice farms were in Arkansas, the
Grand Prairie Region Catch River Valley.
And, um, so a lot of new watermanagement practices are being adopted.
You're seeing some of therice on rice dissipate
(16:54):
By cones of depression.
He means the groundwater is
Yeah.
Becoming further and further down.
It's harder.
Ah,
Oh,
There's less and less of it.
It's further down.
It's more costly to pump.
Yeah.
Thank you.
That's a good, very good point.
If everybody's puttingstraws in the pond and Yeah.
Sucking it up, then it'seventually gonna go dry.
Who's whose straw goes dry first.
(17:15):
Yeah.
Depends on where you're at.
And so it's a true public goods problem.
Um, so
Because there's no,you can drill anywhere?
You can, you can stick a well okay.
Arkansas's one of the few places where.
Yeah, pretty much.
If you want a well, youpay for it and put it in.
Yeah.
Um, but people are paying more attention.
I mean, you blow a, well, uh, you blow apump in the bottom of well, and it costs
(17:36):
you five 10 grand or more to replace than
Yeah, new well costs 30 to 50 thousand.
Okay.
Yeah.
That's I expensive.
Probably more when you get to thecones of depression where it's
deeper to get to groundwater.
The Delta agricultural model is builtlargely on irrigation and the water
(17:57):
scarcity and and challenges around waterare reshaping how they think through it.
Colson, tell us about the soil or thedirt, whatever you guys call it here.
So Chad was asking about running alot of track tractors here, and a
lot of that is because, especiallyin rice production, you are
(18:18):
working with very heavy clay soils.
So what we call sharky clay oralligator clay is great for producing
rice 'cause it doesn't drain well.
Okay.
But it's also drain well.
So
that's why you have lots track tractors.
Very soil.
And then asking aboutwhy our soybeans planted?
(18:39):
So driving I this a big fieldthat's gotta be 60 80 acres of, of
soybeans planted on top of ridges,
Furrows.
Furrows.
What?
What are we doing there?
So, it, it comes backto that soil question.
So soybeans like corndoes not like wet feet.
(19:00):
Soybeans will tolerateit more than corn will.
Okay.
But because our, our soils,especially in these fairly level
fields, you can see the waterstanding between the soybean furrows.
So creating those furrowsgives a little bit of, uh.
It'll help 'em dry out faster, even thoughit's still got that heavy clay soil.
Um, so that's, that's howwe grow a lot of soybeans.
(19:21):
So those are those 30 inch rows?
Is that
I'm guessing that's probably.
I, I almost wanted tosay 36 inch rows there.
Do you plant rice in rowsor you just scatter seed?
Both.
Um, so there are some that even airseed rice, so that's kind of crazy.
They'll, they'll actually fly the seed on.
(19:44):
No way.
I don't think it's super widely adopted.
But now with hybrids it'salmost always drilled in.
But a lot of this is not.
So this is another fieldthat we precision leveled.
And if you notice, you don't see abunch of levees down through this field.
Yeah, it's
Like it's very uniform.
If you see a field that's unleveled.
(20:04):
Or just kinda roughly graded,you'll see tons of levees and
they won't be straight, they'll be
So is that.
That, that's like kind of, uh,this is not the way to say it,
but like, poor man's leveling.
Like you can kind of like keep, youdon't you don't have to level it all to
And it's it's operationally
Way more efficient.
More efficient for the farmer.
Sure.
'cause you're not playing around.
You're trading labor, Right?
So whenI would say it's veryexpensive and hard to produce rice,
(20:28):
it's, it's, it's that, or more,it can be more capital intensive.
So in this case, you're trading havingto pull brand new levies every year for,
hey, I'm go ahead and spend a couplehundred thousand up front and level it
out so we don't have to pull levees.
Oh, so you'd have toremove the levy to harvest.
That's
right.
Oh my godness.
Not necessarily to harvest, buthere's we're going by break 'em
(20:51):
Now see this is a graded field.
This is one a precision than notice thethe levee snakes back through the field.
Okay.
So, so are you like, is this a folk thing?
Like where if you're an old ricefarmer, you can just look at a field
and know where to stick those levees?
'Cause I mean, we're talking those,those things don't take a normal path
or is that, uh, you use a softwareprogram to tell you where to go.
(21:12):
Most people are doing that now.
Okay.
I've got up friend up here, RichardPickett, that he was one of our
grad students when I was in A Stateand, uh, got super into drones, um,
specifically flying Lidar over fields.
And so he runs, he's been in thisbusiness now for, I don't know,
5, 5, 7 years flying drones overfields, getting calculations.
(21:34):
And both precision level for contouring.
You would've just drug.
What do you, I mean, assuming itlooks like a kind kind of a vase
thing that you kind of draggeddrag up sort of a, a furrow?
Right.
How about evaporation of water?
So if the rice that we were lookingat a foot tall and you four inches
of water on the ground, how muchof water soaking in versus being
(21:57):
evaporated versus just stagnant?
Mostly gonna run off.
All of this land drains throughvarious slews and tributaries
the Mississippi River.
And so therein lies uh, this is perpetualproblem in the Mississippi River Delta
for the past hundred 30 years, likekeeping water on you want it, keeping
(22:19):
water off everywhere you don't want it.
It the, uh, THE problem.
So mid hundreds, the delta wasprimarily old growth forest.
And swampy old growth forest.
And folks Lee Wilson came and they,they logged tens of thousands,
(22:41):
hundreds of thousands of acres.
They built railroads.
Initially they started with mules, andthen they, they moved to railroads.
And water became, you water management andgetting water off became a huge problem.
They started engineering lots of newtributaries and created water management
districts where collaborated to, tobuild slews that all fed over to just
(23:06):
massive irrigation management projects.
Large amounts of human capitalspent to get water off.
But also at the time, they'dlogged everything, most of
the value of forest gone.
People had here.
A place like Wilson, Arkansas started,they started producing row crops.
And rice became one of those crops thatwas introduced because, hey, it's a swamp.
(23:29):
Rice likes water.
Let's see what we do.
Um, but when there's excess water onthe fields, hope, in fact, and and
I don't know how much of this goesinto Acre Trader's valuations, I know
farmers, a lot of what they're gonnalook for when evaluate a is It's
(23:50):
you get water on how do you get off?
So if everything floods, ifyour slew or your outlet how
quickly does it drain back down?
Because again, rice, while it likes water,doesn't wanna be underwater very long.
So I just someone with apond their, like their house.
Oh yeah.
Is that a, that's a normal thing.
People dig ponds for recreation?
(24:12):
For sure.
Ponds for recreation.
And then something else see at theRice Center and one the big projects,
one best last big I worked on overhere on, uh, surface reservoirs,
which we've been talking about water,we a lot of water the off season.
The it's, built the to drain off for themost part, and so, and then it dries up
(24:38):
about right now, it'll dry up and thenhave to use groundwater until of season.
So been some pretty major investment overthe years, initially, privately, but now
there's subsidies there Quip and CSP.
To build, know, to take 10, 20 40 acresof production, a surface reservoir
(24:58):
for recreation, also irrigation.
And so capturing all that rainfallduring wet season, and you can then
cycle that your fields production.
And then you groundwater or less of it.
So as two midwest ag economists,can you give us the rice
production year or calendar year?
(25:19):
Right now it's mid-June.
Yeah.
So around here, you're generallygonna plant around May.
Depending a variety and else.
But roughly between itMay to September average.
How tall does the rice get?
Like will it get much tallerthan what we're seeing now?
Yeah.
3 feet roughly.
Um, you get varieties, uh,that are a bit shorter.
(25:44):
Call anywhere two, two.
And a a half feet at the shortest.
You again, in Arkansas you're not gonnasee anything probably three and a half be
the but you go overseas, uh, rice that's,uh, like seven tall in some places.
Oh, wow.
So, Chad, what surprisedyou while you were there?
(26:07):
I was surprised by how similarfarmers are, not in the sense that
you can characterize 'em all thesame, but they seem to also be really
deep in the weeds of their thing.
All of them could have given us aclear explanation of how you grow
rice and why they do it this way.
And I love that.
I think that was, that was, that wasprobably the part, maybe like I was
surprised at how much I was surprised.
(26:27):
So, uh, a couple things surprised me.
The first is, I didn't realizehow beautiful it would be.
So it's, it's in insanely flat.
But there the flatness was like beautiful.
Like the sky was like infinite.
And the sun, it felt like we were likeliterally feet from the sun all the time.
(26:47):
Like it felt like we'relike in the Caribbean.
It was like we woke upand the sun was on us.
We went to bed at night.
The sun was on us somehow still.
It was like just infinite sun.
Totally flat, but just lush and green.
A cool looking breeze often.
Big clouds.
So I was, I was shockedby the beauty of it.
(27:08):
My other surprising thingwas, what growing rice is.
'Cause I have never once thought about it.
I eat rice and I thoughtabout it a little bit.
Like there's this sort of cliche inthe ag sector where it's like people
don't really know what we're doing here.
And like that was definitelytrue of me with rice.
In fact, one of the things that jumpedout at me, the things I'll remember
(27:28):
for a long time is when we wereat one of the research experiments
stations, one of the researchers said,It's the dairy of crop production.
Meaning you're always tinkering,you're always making adjustments.
You're measuring something multipletimes a day and making adjustments
based on the natural climate.
What's current, like if there'sa rain that comes through, you've
(27:49):
gotta adjust your watering practices.
We talked to a number rice farmersand, and people around rice.
I was under the impression thatthe farmers there loved rice.
So I often ask if you didn't have toworry about the, like, financial part
of this, you're just growing 'causeyou enjoy it, what are you gonna grow?
I feel like most farmers aroundhere in Indiana will answer corn.
I'm only planting soybeans or wheat 'causeof like agronomic or economic reasons.
(28:12):
But if this was just purely a hobby,I'm planting corn and I'm watching the
corn and I'm doing stuff in the corn.
I love corn.
So I assume that would betheir case with, with rice.
So we asked specifically, like if you,if, if that was the case for you, you
didn't have to worry about agronomics,you didn't have to worry about economics.
You could just plant, 'cause this is whatyou love to do, would you still grow rice?
And they were like, Nope.
(28:33):
So hopefully if people are gonna listento this series, I'm picturing a lot of
them being people who don't grow rice.
Maybe they grow corn and soybeans.
But there's so much to learn, likeyou're saying, just staying curious.
and, and, and takingsome of that back home.
That's part one of ourLessons From the Delta series.
(28:53):
So next week we'll release more of ourconversations with Aaron Shew while we
were in Arkansas, and you'll hear moreon automation of irrigation and rice
economics versus corn and soybeans.
If you're finding value in this series- we had a lot of fun making it, but
hopefully it's good for you - make sureyou subscribe to the Purdue Commercial
AgCast so you don't miss out on what'scoming next, including our regular
(29:15):
Ag Economy Barometer insights andfuture conversations like this one.
We're also sharing short videos onYouTube from each stop as we were
spending time throughout the Delta,so be sure to check those out as well.
Thanks for joining us, andwe'll see you next time.
Even somebody that farms, corn orsoybeans, you come into rice, there's
a lot of work, like you got levees topull, you got irrigation to manage.
It's a lot more complex.
But rice on rice helps minimizesome of that overhead over time.
But in two pockets in Arkansas wherewe have cones of depression, where I
think there are five rice farmers inArkansas at the end of the 19th century.
(00:23):
And then of course now we growanywhere between 1.3 and 1.5
million acres of rice every year.
50 some percent of the nation's rice
Whoa.
Wow.
50% of the country'srice is produced here.
But those two kinds of depressionare where the original rice
farms were in Arkansas, the GrandPrairie Region Catch River Valley.
So a lot of new water managementpractices are being adopted.
(00:43):
You're seeing some of therice on rice dissipate.
By cones of depression he meansthe groundwater is becoming
further and further down.
There's less and less of it.
It's further down.
It's more costly to pump.
If everybody's putting straws inthe pond and sucking it up, then
it's eventually gonna go dry.
Who's whose straw goes dry firstdepends on where you're at.
And so it's a true public goods problem.
(01:10):
Welcome to the Purdue Commercial AgCast.
This is Chad Fiechter.
And Todd and I had mentioned in aprevious episode that we had this project
last summer where we spent some timein the Mississippi Delta, specifically
in Arkansas, talking with farmers,advisors, researchers and industry
leaders about what they're seeing.
What's working, what's changing,and what might be surprising
to Midwestern grain farmers.
(01:32):
This special series, Lessons fromthe Delta, is what we learned.
We've broken it up into severalepisodes and what you'll hear is a
lot of conversations that we had aswe were driving around the Delta.
Some of 'em are in the truck, infields, conversations that popped up
about managing risk, the challengesaround water, labor, and capital, in
ways that look different than whatwe're familiar with in the Midwest.
(01:54):
Our goal isn't to compare the two regionsbut it's to ask questions where we can
try to learn a little bit more about howproduction systems are built when the
constraints are a little bit different.
What we saw challenges conceptions ofMidwestern farming, specifically around
irrigation and the risk that's managed.
So this is episode One.
(02:17):
As a farm kid.
We are the Eastern Corn Belt.
I saw that there's nuances to the placethat I farm that are really specific.
So don't lump me in with the centralIllinois folks or the Iowa folks.
I'm an Eastern Corn Belt guy, sodon't, don't like, don't characterize
me with the rest of those guys.
Not because there's anything wrong.
It's just like, no, no.
My challenges are differentthan everybody else.
(02:38):
So in the back of my mind,there's been these big places
that I have fascinations in.
So like Brazil is one that somedayI need a pilgrimage to Brazil to
understand what is Brazil like,what is Argentina like, right?
Another place would be Ukraine.
Within the United States, one ofthose being the Mississippi Delta.
And so there's a lot about theMississippi Delta that I don't know,
(03:00):
but we talk about it broadly ag circles,they grow corn and soybeans, right?
Different culture, different ideas.
So where we went is into theMississippi Delta in Arkansas.
Primarily visited a bunch ofthings related to rice production.
So farms, extension personnel, uh,farmland investors in Arkansas.
(03:25):
We went to a couple ofresearch institutes.
So, we talked to not just economists,we talked mostly to physical scientists
that study irrigation, pest management.
Uh, we had a really nice conversationwith a agricultural engineer.
So the kind of technology formoving water was a big part of that
conversation, but also the technologyof dealing with pests or things I
think are kind of universal to farming.
(03:48):
But the things that are uniqueabout the commodities they produce
and where they produce them.
Okay, so you're, you were sort of,it was this mythical place to you
that you wanted to learn more about?
No.
no.
100%. We got to taking this tripbecause we have these great friends.
Who are willing to, to take us around.
So we have these two friendswho we do research with them.
(04:09):
So they work for a company calledAcres is where Aaron works and
a company called Acre Trader.
And they were like, you guysshould come see the delta sometime.
And you were like, I'm on it.
You tell us.
Let's find the dates.
And then Aaron, who was one of ourhosts, was also, he's the one that
set up this great itinerary for us.
But he was like, we need some dates.
You could do these dates, youcould do these other dates, which
(04:30):
to tease some of the things weexperienced had to do with mosquitoes.
100%.
If you go too early, there's not gonnabe rice in the ground to look at.
We don't wanna go in the winterunless you want hunt ducks.
So we had a, a good host that would saylike, oh, we can show you this stuff.
We went to some of their farmsthat their investment farm owns.
But Aaron was also an extensioneconomist, at the University of
(04:51):
Arkansas and at Arkansas State.
So he had all the connectionsto the extension folks, but
also one of his former studentsnow works at Ducks Unlimited.
And he went around with us and talkedto us about the interface between
rice production and the naturalenvironment, particularly ducks.
So duck hunting is a big thing.
We're gonna insert some clips fromAaron and Colson giving us a little
more explanation of what the MississippiDelta is, the scale of rice production,
(05:15):
how flat the train is, and thisidea that they do precision leveling
to help manage rice production.
Can you tell us a littlebit about who you are?
Aaron Shew, I was a professorof agricultural economics at
University of Arkansas, and Istudied a lot of different crops.
Mostly worked in productioneconomics, my main crop of
(05:36):
interest was rice being Arkansas.
So I spent the better part of about 10years, between graduate school and being a
professor studying the economics of rice.
Now I work at a software companycalled Acres and we focus on valuation
and buying and selling of land.
(05:57):
And Colson works at acompany called Acre Trader.
Yes, I work at Acre Trader, which isa, we're a land investment company,
based outta Fayetteville, Arkansas.
That is the sister company to Acres.
And we focus on investing inproductive agricultural ground.
We have a base of retail investorsthat invest in our platform.
(06:18):
And we buy and make long-terminvestments in farm ground throughout
the U.S. So we own quite a fewrice, soybean, cotton, corn farms
in the Delta, where we are today.
We're about to go lookat two of those farms.
And then we own ground in the Southeast,all throughout the Midwest, and quite
a bit in the Pacific Northwest as well.
(06:39):
What defines the delta in your mind?
There's a huge history in the, themid south Mississippi River Delta,
the Mississippi River Alluvial Plane.
The MAP, is the acronym that's often orthe MRVA for the Mississippi River Valley.
Um, and that's generally gonna startin Cairo, Illinois and go all the
(07:02):
way south to where the MississippiRiver meets the Gulf of Mexico.
Obviously geographical significanceto that, though the river itself
widens out, you get a very uniqueterrain, it's flat, right, compared
to once you get to Cairo, Illinois.
So Cairo is where the confluence ofthe Ohio and Mississippi rivers are.
(07:24):
So we're not far from Memphis, Tennessee.
So in Arkansas, how farwest of the river can I be?
And you still consider it the delta?
Probably probably about Searcy, Arkansas.
Think of it like it'sroughly, it's third eastern.
Third.
Yeah.
Eastern.
Eastern.
Third, third, Little, Little Rock east.
So put a dart in the middle of thestate, move, you know, directly east,
(07:49):
about 40 miles and you're in the Delta.
I study farmland markets and peoplethat were interested in investing
farmland as a, a like investmentasset for for a while really hot on
the
Delta.
And the argument they were
making
is you can plant
three
four different
commodities and
(08:09):
and you can let the annual variation inthe economics, costs and returns of those
commodities dictate what you do as opposed
to
the corn belt where we have two,maybe three commodities that
you could do with that land.
And so if farmers here plant anything.
They didn't to worryabout making money, right?
They just plant 'causethat's they like do.
They would still plant rice, thatrice still what they'd prefer to do?
(08:32):
So broadly of the Deltaa geographic region.
That thesis holds true, maybe that'sa reason that historically land
stable other parts of the country.
But a farm to farm basis, I don'tthink that, there's not that much
(08:54):
crop optionality, in my opinion.
So like these heavy soils,you're typically confined a
growing rice and soybeans.
You have optionality cotton andcorn, you're not gonna do either.
You're pretty much pretty stuckwith two, two crops there.
Then you move to lighter sandiersoils, most of those guys
(09:17):
are corn, cotton, soybeans.
But but the switching costs between beingsomebody grows cotton and somebody that
doesn't cotton is incredibly expensive.
So in order to grow cotton, yougotta buy a cotton picker, and
that costs 600,000 plus probably.
So guys are typicallymarried to growing cotton.
(09:39):
Guys who grow rice, rice,and it's that easy to switch.
So on a farm to farm basisthat necessarily holds true.
I'd say the difference between hereand Midwest is a lot of guys here
are operating thousands, if not of
thousands
acres, and they're spread over pretty widegeography, so they moving equipment a lot.
(10:00):
Equipment's dispersed around.
More than I see guys Midwest.
Talk about scale.
'cause that's, that's different.
What do what do you mean by that?
Like, geographically dispersed.
They grow a lot in one area or?
Talk about the farmers that are here.
Both and.
There farmers obviously with less thana few thousand acres, but I mean, most
(10:27):
people that are farming rice farmingmultiple thousands of acres at least.
And they're the bigger operators,uh, are even into the, into
the 15 to 25,000 acre range.
So yeah, just to that point, youbasically move your equipment all
year, field to field, and alwayssomething you need your equipment for.
(10:50):
What's the, what's the, likemachinery bottleneck in rice?
Like is it combine capacity, isit ability to get it sprayed?
Is it planting?
I don't know that it's so much equipment.
As it is weather.
Feel like weather is probably the biggest
Maybe levees and dirt work.
If anything.
(11:10):
Levees and dirt work.
Because that, because you have to dothat before you plant, so you got that.
A lot of rice farmers burn stubble.
I think research is really mixed,but rice straw has really high silica
content and I'm not a soil scientist,uh, by any means, but I think there's
(11:30):
debate among soil scientists even that,hey if you till in that high silica
straw, it doesn't break down welland it inhibit nitrogen other uptake.
It's pretty thick.
I mean, if go through a a rice cut, lotof, of organic matter, right, leftover.
More than like a wheat field?
You been Yeah.
Okay.
(11:50):
Yeah.
More than that.
And it doesn't break down like wheatstubble does because of the silica in it.
And so people will burn it off.
Um,
And do you mean like burn, likefire or burn, like chemical?
No, burn fire.
Yeah And so like, I mean,it's, they're big fires.
And what would be the other, like, likeyou would try to harvest that biomass
(12:11):
and do something with it, or what, whatelse, what other options do you have?
I'm not sure that the research issuper solid that it won't break down,
and there are some really innovative,uh, that are experimenting with other,
otherwise they're trying to till itplanning and doing experiments on
yield
to see how much changes.
So turning your irrigation off.
(12:31):
So let's through how irrigation works.
Mm-hmm.
So generally, is it coming from aspring or like a, it's all groundwater.
I mean, of course years, thisyear we get enough rain that it'll
stay flooded until early July.
Um, and you got, you're trying tokeep it roughly around four inches.
Could be, could be less at sometimes.
(12:53):
And there's some methods thatare increasingly adopted, like
alternating, wetting and drying.
So they'll flood it up for awhile and then let it drain
back down over a few weeks.
Save water.
Improves greenhouse gasemissions, things of that nature.
But when they do irrigate, it's generallygroundwater from the alluvial aquifer.
So hundreds of feet under us big aquifers.
(13:16):
Uh, they'll pump it up.
In pump like this and spill out And thenthey'll often pipes that run out to risers
where you can see there's a levee there.
There's kind of a raisedto section off the field.
That's how they help manage thewater depth across a varied terrain.
Uh, or in our case here, it's, it'sactually, uh, been leveled so that it's
(13:37):
a very specific, uh, depth everywhere.
But they'll have risers evenrunning thousands of feet.
So even though, we're probably, it's along way over there, it's like a mile
across these fields, and you could haverisers where this pump actually pumps
water underground through a pipe andit rises and dumps out in that field.
What's that cost like per acre?
(13:58):
And how often do youhave do it, do you know?
So it all depends on the level,how unlevel it was before.
So on this farm.
I think this farm, we spent somewherebetween four and $500,000 on
leveling to do three to 400 acres.
(14:18):
Okay.
Okay?
So a thousand, 1500 bucks an acre.
Um, and you don't have to do it often,but you do have to true it up sometimes.
So over time, dirt moves around,you have to come in and clean it
up a little bit, but that $1,500 anacre cost is a one time expenditure.
So, so how level are we talking?
Is this like.
Tennis court level, or we gota couple inches of variation.
(14:42):
So this side of the road, we didn'tcome in a level, it was already done
as already what we'd call graded.
So it's the whole fieldslopes a certain direction.
Typically at like a, I don'tthey call it at a 10th.
Yeah.
I don't know what a 10th,what metric that is.
Okay.
very light.
It's like
don't even know, a hundredfeet or something like
(15:02):
So like, like a less than like a railroad.
moves, right?
it looks very flat.
No, it looks super flat.
It all looks like way
On this side of the road.
We came in and precision leveled it.
So the entire field isat the same elevation.
Oh, and
The reason for that is that like thepremier way to grow rice, and we'll
get back to the pumping water questionin a second with this, but like the
(15:22):
premier way to grow rice is rice on rice.
So, um, just in terms of managinga field and an operation, you know,
when, generally when even somebodythat farms, say they have a background
in farming, corn or soybeans, um.
You come into rice, there's a lotof work, like you got levees to
pull, you got irrigation to manage.
(15:44):
It's a lot more complex.
All of your herbicides change, right?
Because a lot of herbicidesare not sprayed in rice.
They're water.
Deployed.
Oh,
Oh.
Cool
So there's a lot of, like, you have toknow a lot and it's often a lot more work.
I mean, the new technologies in riceare like, Hey, how do we automate
the irrigation coming on and off?
You know?
'cause I don't wanna get up at 2:00 AMand have to drive 10 miles to my field.
(16:07):
Um, but rice on rice helps minimizesome of that overhead, right?
Uh, over time, but in someplaces, not here, but it, there
are two pockets in Arkansas.
Where we have cones of depression, wherewe've been, you know, rice has been ar
or I think there are five rice farmers inArkansas at the end of the 19th century.
And then of course now we have, we grow,I don't know, anywhere between 1.3 and
(16:32):
1.5 million acres of rice every year.
50 some percent of the nation's rice
Whoa.
Wow.
50% of the country'srice is produced here.
But those two kinds of depression.
You know, are often, that's where theoriginal rice farms were in Arkansas, the
Grand Prairie Region Catch River Valley.
And, um, so a lot of new watermanagement practices are being adopted.
You're seeing some of therice on rice dissipate
(16:54):
By cones of depression.
He means the groundwater is
Yeah.
Becoming further and further down.
It's harder.
Ah,
Oh,
There's less and less of it.
It's further down.
It's more costly to pump.
Yeah.
Thank you.
That's a good, very good point.
If everybody's puttingstraws in the pond and Yeah.
Sucking it up, then it'seventually gonna go dry.
Who's whose straw goes dry first.
(17:15):
Yeah.
Depends on where you're at.
And so it's a true public goods problem.
Um, so
Because there's no,you can drill anywhere?
You can, you can stick a well okay.
Arkansas's one of the few places where.
Yeah, pretty much.
If you want a well, youpay for it and put it in.
Yeah.
Um, but people are paying more attention.
I mean, you blow a, well, uh, you blow apump in the bottom of well, and it costs
(17:36):
you five 10 grand or more to replace than
Yeah, new well costs 30 to 50 thousand.
Okay.
Yeah.
That's I expensive.
Probably more when you get to thecones of depression where it's
deeper to get to groundwater.
The Delta agricultural model is builtlargely on irrigation and the water
(17:57):
scarcity and and challenges around waterare reshaping how they think through it.
Colson, tell us about the soil or thedirt, whatever you guys call it here.
So Chad was asking about running alot of track tractors here, and a
lot of that is because, especiallyin rice production, you are
(18:18):
working with very heavy clay soils.
So what we call sharky clay oralligator clay is great for producing
rice 'cause it doesn't drain well.
Okay.
But it's also drain well.
So
that's why you have lots track tractors.
Very soil.
And then asking aboutwhy our soybeans planted?
(18:39):
So driving I this a big fieldthat's gotta be 60 80 acres of, of
soybeans planted on top of ridges,
Furrows.
Furrows.
What?
What are we doing there?
So, it, it comes backto that soil question.
So soybeans like corndoes not like wet feet.
(19:00):
Soybeans will tolerateit more than corn will.
Okay.
But because our, our soils,especially in these fairly level
fields, you can see the waterstanding between the soybean furrows.
So creating those furrowsgives a little bit of, uh.
It'll help 'em dry out faster, even thoughit's still got that heavy clay soil.
Um, so that's, that's howwe grow a lot of soybeans.
(19:21):
So those are those 30 inch rows?
Is that
I'm guessing that's probably.
I, I almost wanted tosay 36 inch rows there.
Do you plant rice in rowsor you just scatter seed?
Both.
Um, so there are some that even airseed rice, so that's kind of crazy.
They'll, they'll actually fly the seed on.
(19:44):
No way.
I don't think it's super widely adopted.
But now with hybrids it'salmost always drilled in.
But a lot of this is not.
So this is another fieldthat we precision leveled.
And if you notice, you don't see abunch of levees down through this field.
Yeah, it's
Like it's very uniform.
If you see a field that's unleveled.
(20:04):
Or just kinda roughly graded,you'll see tons of levees and
they won't be straight, they'll be
So is that.
That, that's like kind of, uh,this is not the way to say it,
but like, poor man's leveling.
Like you can kind of like keep, youdon't you don't have to level it all to
And it's it's operationally
Way more efficient.
More efficient for the farmer.
Sure.
'cause you're not playing around.
You're trading labor, Right?
So whenI would say it's veryexpensive and hard to produce rice,
(20:28):
it's, it's, it's that, or more,it can be more capital intensive.
So in this case, you're trading havingto pull brand new levies every year for,
hey, I'm go ahead and spend a couplehundred thousand up front and level it
out so we don't have to pull levees.
Oh, so you'd have toremove the levy to harvest.
That's
right.
Oh my godness.
Not necessarily to harvest, buthere's we're going by break 'em
(20:51):
Now see this is a graded field.
This is one a precision than notice thethe levee snakes back through the field.
Okay.
So, so are you like, is this a folk thing?
Like where if you're an old ricefarmer, you can just look at a field
and know where to stick those levees?
'Cause I mean, we're talking those,those things don't take a normal path
or is that, uh, you use a softwareprogram to tell you where to go.
(21:12):
Most people are doing that now.
Okay.
I've got up friend up here, RichardPickett, that he was one of our
grad students when I was in A Stateand, uh, got super into drones, um,
specifically flying Lidar over fields.
And so he runs, he's been in thisbusiness now for, I don't know,
5, 5, 7 years flying drones overfields, getting calculations.
(21:34):
And both precision level for contouring.
You would've just drug.
What do you, I mean, assuming itlooks like a kind kind of a vase
thing that you kind of draggeddrag up sort of a, a furrow?
Right.
How about evaporation of water?
So if the rice that we were lookingat a foot tall and you four inches
of water on the ground, how muchof water soaking in versus being
(21:57):
evaporated versus just stagnant?
Mostly gonna run off.
All of this land drains throughvarious slews and tributaries
the Mississippi River.
And so therein lies uh, this is perpetualproblem in the Mississippi River Delta
for the past hundred 30 years, likekeeping water on you want it, keeping
(22:19):
water off everywhere you don't want it.
It the, uh, THE problem.
So mid hundreds, the delta wasprimarily old growth forest.
And swampy old growth forest.
And folks Lee Wilson came and they,they logged tens of thousands,
(22:41):
hundreds of thousands of acres.
They built railroads.
Initially they started with mules, andthen they, they moved to railroads.
And water became, you water management andgetting water off became a huge problem.
They started engineering lots of newtributaries and created water management
districts where collaborated to, tobuild slews that all fed over to just
(23:06):
massive irrigation management projects.
Large amounts of human capitalspent to get water off.
But also at the time, they'dlogged everything, most of
the value of forest gone.
People had here.
A place like Wilson, Arkansas started,they started producing row crops.
And rice became one of those crops thatwas introduced because, hey, it's a swamp.
(23:29):
Rice likes water.
Let's see what we do.
Um, but when there's excess water onthe fields, hope, in fact, and and
I don't know how much of this goesinto Acre Trader's valuations, I know
farmers, a lot of what they're gonnalook for when evaluate a is It's
(23:50):
you get water on how do you get off?
So if everything floods, ifyour slew or your outlet how
quickly does it drain back down?
Because again, rice, while it likes water,doesn't wanna be underwater very long.
So I just someone with apond their, like their house.
Oh yeah.
Is that a, that's a normal thing.
People dig ponds for recreation?
(24:12):
For sure.
Ponds for recreation.
And then something else see at theRice Center and one the big projects,
one best last big I worked on overhere on, uh, surface reservoirs,
which we've been talking about water,we a lot of water the off season.
The it's, built the to drain off for themost part, and so, and then it dries up
(24:38):
about right now, it'll dry up and thenhave to use groundwater until of season.
So been some pretty major investment overthe years, initially, privately, but now
there's subsidies there Quip and CSP.
To build, know, to take 10, 20 40 acresof production, a surface reservoir
(24:58):
for recreation, also irrigation.
And so capturing all that rainfallduring wet season, and you can then
cycle that your fields production.
And then you groundwater or less of it.
So as two midwest ag economists,can you give us the rice
production year or calendar year?
(25:19):
Right now it's mid-June.
Yeah.
So around here, you're generallygonna plant around May.
Depending a variety and else.
But roughly between itMay to September average.
How tall does the rice get?
Like will it get much tallerthan what we're seeing now?
Yeah.
3 feet roughly.
Um, you get varieties, uh,that are a bit shorter.
(25:44):
Call anywhere two, two.
And a a half feet at the shortest.
You again, in Arkansas you're not gonnasee anything probably three and a half be
the but you go overseas, uh, rice that's,uh, like seven tall in some places.
Oh, wow.
So, Chad, what surprisedyou while you were there?
(26:07):
I was surprised by how similarfarmers are, not in the sense that
you can characterize 'em all thesame, but they seem to also be really
deep in the weeds of their thing.
All of them could have given us aclear explanation of how you grow
rice and why they do it this way.
And I love that.
I think that was, that was, that wasprobably the part, maybe like I was
surprised at how much I was surprised.
(26:27):
So, uh, a couple things surprised me.
The first is, I didn't realizehow beautiful it would be.
So it's, it's in insanely flat.
But there the flatness was like beautiful.
Like the sky was like infinite.
And the sun, it felt like we were likeliterally feet from the sun all the time.
(26:47):
Like it felt like we'relike in the Caribbean.
It was like we woke upand the sun was on us.
We went to bed at night.
The sun was on us somehow still.
It was like just infinite sun.
Totally flat, but just lush and green.
A cool looking breeze often.
Big clouds.
So I was, I was shockedby the beauty of it.
(27:08):
My other surprising thingwas, what growing rice is.
'Cause I have never once thought about it.
I eat rice and I thoughtabout it a little bit.
Like there's this sort of cliche inthe ag sector where it's like people
don't really know what we're doing here.
And like that was definitelytrue of me with rice.
In fact, one of the things that jumpedout at me, the things I'll remember
(27:28):
for a long time is when we wereat one of the research experiments
stations, one of the researchers said,It's the dairy of crop production.
Meaning you're always tinkering,you're always making adjustments.
You're measuring something multipletimes a day and making adjustments
based on the natural climate.
What's current, like if there'sa rain that comes through, you've
(27:49):
gotta adjust your watering practices.
We talked to a number rice farmersand, and people around rice.
I was under the impression thatthe farmers there loved rice.
So I often ask if you didn't have toworry about the, like, financial part
of this, you're just growing 'causeyou enjoy it, what are you gonna grow?
I feel like most farmers aroundhere in Indiana will answer corn.
I'm only planting soybeans or wheat 'causeof like agronomic or economic reasons.
(28:12):
But if this was just purely a hobby,I'm planting corn and I'm watching the
corn and I'm doing stuff in the corn.
I love corn.
So I assume that would betheir case with, with rice.
So we asked specifically, like if you,if, if that was the case for you, you
didn't have to worry about agronomics,you didn't have to worry about economics.
You could just plant, 'cause this is whatyou love to do, would you still grow rice?
And they were like, Nope.
(28:33):
So hopefully if people are gonna listento this series, I'm picturing a lot of
them being people who don't grow rice.
Maybe they grow corn and soybeans.
But there's so much to learn, likeyou're saying, just staying curious.
and, and, and takingsome of that back home.
That's part one of ourLessons From the Delta series.
(28:53):
So next week we'll release more of ourconversations with Aaron Shew while we
were in Arkansas, and you'll hear moreon automation of irrigation and rice
economics versus corn and soybeans.
If you're finding value in this series- we had a lot of fun making it, but
hopefully it's good for you - make sureyou subscribe to the Purdue Commercial
AgCast so you don't miss out on what'scoming next, including our regular
(29:15):
Ag Economy Barometer insights andfuture conversations like this one.
We're also sharing short videos onYouTube from each stop as we were
spending time throughout the Delta,so be sure to check those out as well.
Thanks for joining us, andwe'll see you next time.
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