Rice: heavy rains hit Texas rice country but miss parched S. Louisiana

Parts of Texas rice country received overwhelming amounts of rain on Monday – up to 18 inches in seven hours just outside of Beaumont. But the heavy rains pretty much played out before they reaching southern Louisiana, which remains parched and in need of steady rains to eliminate salt contamination caused by Hurricane Rita last fall.

We’ll have more details in tonight’s RiceFax. Here’s a preliminary report:

West of El Campo, it rained five to six inches, with totals increasing to 10 to 12 inches in the Victoria area. Between Houston and the Louisiana line, the system dumped even more rain in places. Bayous and canals were already backing up this morning. David Mitchell with M&M Air Service in Beaumont, said that it rained nearly 15 inches at his home between about 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. Monday. Local canals and bayous were backing up today, he said, and the nearby Winnie municipal airport had water in some hangers. “One competitor said that fish and crawfish were swimming in his hanger this morning,” Mitchell reported.

Mitchell said that his immediate area probably received the most rainfall, and as you moved away in any direction the totals fell off to three to four inches.

Garry N. McCauley, acting Texas Extension Rice Specialist, said that the central counties in the state’s rice production area receive lesser amounts, from maybe a half-inch to 1.5 inches. Where it did rain, many levees were submerged. At least 35% of the crop is at PD and 5% -- mainly in Matagorda County – has started heading, he specified. “We’ll have to wait until all this water recedes before we know how much of a hit we took,” McCauley added.

To the east, growers in Louisiana were disappointed that at least some of the rain didn’t make it to them. Parts of south Louisiana have only had two months with normal or above-normal rainfall, and those were August and September of 2005 when hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast.

“Since January 1, we’re at a 10-inch deficit for rainfall, and the deficit since April 2005 is something like 25 inches,” says Eddie Eskew, Jeff Davis Parish Extension Agent in Jennings, La. Eskew said it maybe rained a quarter of an inch at Jennings.

Howard Cormier, Vermilion Parish Extension Agent, Abbeville, La., said he measured three-quarters of an inch at his home, which is near the center of the pairsh. Vermilion’s rice acreage is down 60% from 2005, mainly due to salt-contaminated soil and surface water. Farmers planted just over 30,000 acres this year, but Cormier doesn’t expect all of that to make it to harvest. Without fresh water, some rice is now languishing without a flood.

”We need two to three inches of rain about every two weeks over a period of time to flush away the salt,” Cormier said. “Even with that, we’ve already lost future rice acreage. In some cases, growers who couldn’t grow rice this year have taken jobs in town or something else, and a lot of them probably won’t be back. We’ll continue to have rice here for years to come, but not like in the past.”