Missouri Rice Farming

Rice. Not a crop most people associate with Missouri, but the Show-Me State ranks fifth in rice production nationally. Missouri farmers in eight southeastern counties produce an average of one and a quarter billion pounds of rice each year. Rance Daniels, a third-generation farmer from Dunklin County, began growing rice on 200 acres in the Bootheel in 1992. His operation has grown over the years, and Daniels now farms between 1,500 and 2,000 acres of rice. We have plenty of water, the water availability, and our soil type is suited for rice production. We have a heavy clay soil that's really suited for growing rice on. Daniels grows conventional and hybrid long-grain rice varieties, both of which are milled into white rice. It doesn't look like white rice when you harvest. They had to take the husk and the bran layer off of it, but it's the same rice that you can get in your grocery stores. The rice season begins with planting, which typically takes place between late March and early April. Once the crop's in the ground, it's time for the water. During the growing season, the rice fields are submerged with water pumped from groundwater irrigation systems. When we flood it, we put two to four inches of water on it, and after we flood it, it's Basically from mid-May until the first of August, it's just maintaining your water. The first of August to the middle of August, we'll stop pumping. Three weeks after you drain the water, we'll begin harvest. We have tracks on our combine, and we have a tractor on tracks because sometimes if it stays wet in the fall, our fields are extremely muddy, and the tracks help in not creating ruts and not getting stuck. And then the header that I have is called a Shelburne Reynolds stripper header, and it strips the grain. It doesn't take any of the leaf material, it just strips the grain off the head. The yields with rice is, we'll make anywhere from 150 to 220 bushel rice, so it takes a lot of support equipment. We run two grain carts per combine. When I had to go to the mill, we run six trucks going back and forth to the mill with our rice. We haul our rice to this rice land, which is a farmer-owned cooperative, and we haul ours to Jonesboro, which is 60 miles south of here. They mill the rice, actually take it from the field condition to the white rice that you see in your stores. After harvest, migratory waterfowl find both food and cover in the rice fields. We will hold the water back on our rice fields for waterfowl. It's a very big conservation benefit for the migrating ducks headed south for the winter. Because Missouri's boot heel is so well-suited for rice production, Daniels and other Missouri rice farmers are able to add to the diversity of the Show-Me State's agriculture.