LITTLE ROCK — With more than 1 million acres of Arkansas cropland under water, the impact of flooding to Arkansas crops and forage is expected to top $500 million dollars, according to preliminary research by ag economists at the Arkansas Farm Bureau.
A total of 63 counties in Arkansas have been declared disaster areas as a result of storms and flooding that have ravaged the state since late April. As the state’s largest industry segment, agriculture annually accounts for $16 billion of Arkansas’ economy, so any significant impact will have effects far beyond the farmers’ and ranchers’ direct losses.
“We are seeing flood levels never seen before,” said Randy Veach, a cotton, rice and soybean farmer from Manila (Mississippi County), who is president of the Arkansas Farm Bureau. “The effect to our state’s commodity crops is staggering, and the entire impact can’t be adequately determined for several months.”
Veach noted the Farm Bureau’s estimate does not include costs to repair infrastructure, farm equipment, loss of grain in storage bins, and repairs to farmland, which could reach well into the tens of millions of dollars.
“We aren’t likely to see significant activity in these flooded areas until June 1, at the earliest,” said Warren Carter, director of commodity and regulatory affairs for Arkansas Farm Bureau. “There is an awful lot of water that still has to move through our river systems, and significant drying will have to occur before our farmers can begin the difficult work of reworking their ground.
“There is no way to overstate the impact of this to those affected. It has been devastating.”
Carter said he expects the loss in rice acreage to near 300,000 acres, resulting in a loss of $300 million in rice production. Arkansas is the largest rice-producing state in the nation, annually accounting for about half of the nation’s rice crop.
Carter noted that much of the loss of the commodity crops could be offset by plantings of other crops. Soybean acreage, as an example, is expected to skyrocket, because the planting window for that crop is significantly wider than for rice, cotton, corn and grain sorghum. However, late-planted crops are susceptible to a number of additional risks, including early frosts, hurricane season, insect and disease issues and other problems. This makes the replacement value of those crops difficult to assess.
Arkansas was projected to plant 1.3 million acres of rice in 2011. Some of the rice crop already planted could survive the floods, though reduced yield and quality issues will likely limit the value of that crop further.
Comments (0) Leave a comment