High demand, price of rice good news to US farmers

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California's cooler weather produces mostly medium- and short-grain rice varieties, the moist, sticky kinds favored for sushi or risotto. With some of its main competitors out of the market Australia due to a long drought, Egypt because of a decision to cut back on exports the price of medium-grain rice rose from $551 per ton in April 2007 to $750 per ton a year later.

The long-grain varieties that grow better in the warmer climates of Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana went from $397 a ton in April 2007 to $794 a year later as competitors such as India and Brazil also pulled back from the international market.

So even though the global crop is larger than ever, and U.S. production is strong, third-generation California rice farmer Zachary Dennis will get a good deal for the grain he's planting right now.

"This is probably the first year in a while that we'll do more than break even," Dennis said as rice from the biplane seeding his fields pelts the cab of his truck.

And it'll come just in time to pull him and other growers out of the red, where they've been plunged by escalating fuel and fertilizer prices, he said.

Mississippi rice farmer Gary Fioranelli, chairman of the U.S. Rice Producers Association, said rice prices had been so low since 2000 that the state's farmers had started switching to corn and soybeans, reducing rice acreage from a peak of 250,000 acres to 190,000 this year.

The recent lurch in prices might help some of the growers who have remained, he said.

"The machines we use are really expensive, and the gas prices," he said, stopping his tractor to explain the economics of his business over his cell phone. "It'll take these good prices to just stay even."

Complaints about the high price of oil are a common refrain among rice farmers, who generally run large, high-cost, high-yield operations that stand in contrast to the traditional, labor-intensive methods still used in parts of Asia, where farmers wade into rice paddies to transplant shoots then harvest with hand-held sickles.

U.S. rice fields are bigger on average than soy, corn or wheat farms, and rely heavily on expensive, gas-guzzling machinery, from the John Deere tractor pulling a 21-foot-wide disking attachment to prepare another parcel of Dennis' land for planting to the buzzing aircraft above.

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