NE Ark. and Mo. Bootheel Crops Take A Big Hit

The following came from tonight's issue of SoyFax: Midsouth:

Initial estimates in northeast Arkansas and the Missouri bootheel indicate significant crop loss and damage due to wind, rain and flooding. Heavy rains – with amounts ranging from 4 to 18 inches – moved through those areas on Friday and Saturday, and rivers are still rising in counties to the south.

At least 30,000 acres of rice could be lost to flooding in northeast Arkansas, said Brent Griffin, Agronomist with Cache River Valley Seed, LLC, in Cash, Ark. Griffin bases that on discussions in the last 2 days with county FSA personnel in that part of the state.

“In Clay County, I was told that 40,000 acres had not been harvested yet, and of that amount, about half might be lost,” Griffin said today. “Randolph County might lose 6,000 acres of rice, while folks in Lawrence and Jackson Counties were estimating that 10% could be affected by flooding.”

Of the rice that wasn’t flooded, “it appears that 25% to 30% has lodged,” he estimated.

Tributary levels in northeast Arkansas are rising now, and growers with bottomland fields are scrambling to cut any rice that’s ready, said Griffin. “A lot of the beans in those bottoms are maybe 7 to 14 days from being ready for harvest,” he noted.

Randy Woodard, a partner in Cache River Valley Seed, drove through the affected areas this week and described the situation as “awful.”

“As we crossed into Missouri, there seemed to be more water,” Woodard said. “And compared to northeast Arkansas, they seem to have a higher percentage of the crop still in the field. It looked like 60% to 65% had not been cut yet in the areas I saw.”

No loss estimates were immediately available in Missouri. Brian V. Ottis, Rice Agronomist at the Delta REC at Portageville, Mo., said that he’s actually finding less lodging that he initially expected. But a good deal of the rice that did lodge will probably be lost, particularly where water continues to stand in fields.

“The grain was dry before the rain, and the seed will imbibe water now,” he said today. “By the time the water goes down, a lot of rice will have rotted. There is a substantial area still flooded, and the water is receding very slowly.”

How the flooding affects soybeans remains is an open question at this point, said Grover Shannon, University of Missouri Soybean Breeder at Portageville.

“One thing maybe in our favor is that the weather has been cool, so beans may not rot,” Shannon said. “But the water is going down slowly. The St. Francis River and other rivers can’t carry it off fast enough.”

Before the flood, soybean harvest had started in some fields, and the highest yields Shannon heard were “in the 60s and a few even into the 70s (bu/acre).”

“That certainly wasn’t across the board,” he emphasized. “But those yields did indicate good potential. How much of that we lose remains to be seen. This is affecting every crop here. A lot of the rice that lodged has fallen into standing water, and cotton farmers are concerned about grades and quality where fields have flooded.”

The highest amounts of rain tended to be in the middle section of the bootheel, Shannon reported.

How flooding will affect soybeans may depend, in part, on whether beans were fully mature or still green, said Trey Reaper, Arkansas Area Extension Soybean Agronomist.

“There isn’t much research to help you estimate what the potential yield loss might be,” he said. “The thinking is that there might be lower yield lossed where water recedes in less than 48 hours. But there’s also concern about whether mature beans might shatter before farmers even have a chance to start cutting.”

Initially, Randolph and Clay Counties received the most rain in Arkansas. But parts of at least 4 other counties could be subject to bottomland flooding by the time all the water moves through that part of the state, Reaper said.

Click here for a photo gallary of this week's crop flooding and damage.