.png)
Thoughts on Rice
This podcast is for growers, PCAs, consultants, and other industry professionals in the California rice industry. We'll primarily be focusing on the Sacramento Valley and Delta Region of California. The UCCE Rice Farm Advisors aim to deliver extension information relating to the California rice industry.
Find out more about UCCE and California rice here!
Thoughts on Rice
Early Fall Rice Round Table with the UCCE Rice Group
To round out the month of September and to start off October, we're going to hold a "Rice Round Table" to talk about some of the farm calls and questions we have gotten this past month, as well as discuss what to expect going forward in the season. Join members of the UCCE Rice Group, Luis Espino, Whitney Brim-Deforest, Bruce Linquist, Michelle Leinfelder-Miles, and Sarah Marsh as they recap rice in early fall 2024.
Other Resources
Rice in the Delta
Mention of an agrichemical does not constitute a recommendation, merely the sharing of research findings. Always follow the label. The label is the law. Find out more at ipm.ucanr.edu.
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent the views, thoughts, and opinions of the University of California. The material and information presented here is for general purposes only. The "University of California" name and all forms and abbreviations are the property of its owner and its use does not imply endorsement of or opposition to any specific organization, product, or service.
UC ANR is an equal opportunity provider and employer
Hello and welcome to Thoughts on Rice, a podcast hosted by the University of California Cooperative Extension Rice Advisors. Together, the UCCE Rice Farm Advisors seek to provide relevant, topical, research-backed information relating to California rice production. For clarity's sake, this episode was recorded at the end of September, and so when you hear us referring to last week or a couple of days ago, just keep that in mind when listening to this episode. To round out the month of September and to start off October, we're going to hold a rice roundtable to talk about some of the farm calls and questions we've gotten this past month, as well as discuss what to expect going forward in the season. We're going to start off with a round of introductions, and we'll start off with our furthest north advisor. Luis, you want to go ahead?
SPEAKER_00:Yes, Luis Espino, Farm Advisor for Butte and Glynn Counties.
SPEAKER_03:My name is Sarah Marsh. I'm the Rice Farming Systems Advisor for Colusa and Yolo Counties, and I'm based out of the Colusa office.
SPEAKER_01:I'm Whitney Brenda Forrest. I'm the Rice Advisor for Sutter Yuba, Placer, and Sacramento Counties, and I'm based out of Sutter and Yuba.
SPEAKER_04:And I'm Bruce Lindquist. I'm the Rice Specialist based out of the UC Davis campus.
SPEAKER_02:And I'm Michelle Leinfelder-Miles. I'm a Farm Advisor based in the Delta region. I work on agronomic crops, including rice.
SPEAKER_03:Well, thank you all for making the time. At the time of recording, it's the end of September, and I know we're all pretty busy at this point, so I appreciate you all taking a couple of minutes out of your day. Now, just real quick, going around the table we have here, what have you guys been hearing about farm calls? What I've been hearing in terms of farm calls is most people I've been talking to are getting ready for harvest, and a lot of people are waiting for their moisture levels to drop. I've been hearing moistures of about 28% or so. And so people are just really hoping that this heat coming up will help dry out some of the rice so they can get in there and start harvesting. What are you guys hearing?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I haven't heard on that, on the moisture, but yeah, there's a lot of waiting right now. I've gotten a couple of calls, somebody sending me some Some pictures about a conical injury and what it seemed to be army worm or maybe grasshoppers. You know, that was something that I got a couple of weeks ago. And then a few calls about blast, you know, people that thought they had blast and at least one of them, I went out and it was something else. I'm not sure what it was, but it wasn't blast. And just today I got a couple of pictures from a grower and with and this does look like blast just on the pictures i can tell this blast so up in glen county bailey's area so i'll i'll go up there and take us take a few samples probably uh sometime later this week and this is a pca that was wondering what was what was the injury because uh you know they did he didn't see any any worms He wasn't sure if this was armyworm. It looked a lot like armyworm or maybe grasshoppers. So, you know, maybe he was wondering, is this also related to the heat? But I don't think so. I think it was armyworm or grasshoppers.
SPEAKER_03:It'd be interesting if it was armyworms because we hit the peak a while ago, the second peak anyway. So would it be normal to see this?
SPEAKER_00:Well, it could have been that it was just, you know, injured and And then, you know, the panicles just stay like that. So the injury could be a little older.
SPEAKER_03:Any other calls people are hearing or questions that have come up in conversations?
SPEAKER_04:I mean, I just have gotten a few calls just related to maturity. I think growers were expecting the crop to be a lot further along because of a very warm summer. And I think they were expecting it to be further along than it is, that they'd be harvesting a bit earlier. And, you know, we saw heading dates that were maybe two to four days earlier than an average year. But, you know, really once you get past a certain temperature, once they get above like maybe 95, the plant doesn't keep on just getting faster and faster. It just kind of stops at that stage. So, yeah, I think the combination of a late plant Thank you. which is going to kind of push out a little bit your harvest. And then, yeah, we are seeing slightly earlier, but not way earlier maturity.
SPEAKER_03:Whitney, did you want to comment on that?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, I haven't gotten any calls about maturity necessarily, but I did get a couple of calls about the impact of weeds on moisture levels. And I guess we don't have any hard data on this, but anecdotally, I would say that if you have a large amount of especially like water grass maybe or red stem in your field that it could change the moisture reading on your combine as you're harvesting. I got a question about how that would affect drying in the mill and that I don't know but I would imagine it would also have some sort of impact there too. So yeah if people have really weedy fields I could imagine that they're getting artificially high moisture levels in the field.
SPEAKER_03:It's interesting you mentioned in the weeds, just anecdotally, just driving around the valley, I've seen a lot of really weedy fields and a few other just extremely clean fields. It seems like there's a pretty wide range in weed control this year. Yeah,
SPEAKER_01:I've been seeing a shocking amount of redberry and redstem, which to me was kind of surprising because we do have good herbicides to control redberry. But yeah, I've been seeing a lot of it and getting a lot of calls about it. So I'm not sure where we went wrong this year with red stem or red berry control, but that might be something we need to focus on a little bit more next year.
SPEAKER_03:And then Michelle, down there in the Delta region, with your growers, are you hearing anything specific in farm calls or is everyone pretty much getting ready to harvest?
SPEAKER_02:I had a call similar to Luis. I had a grower call me out to look at some fields, wondering whether there was blast. I didn't notice. I didn't observe anything that made me think that there was blast. So I think that boded well for that grower. Other than that, I think most growers are just getting ready to harvest or they're already harvesting something else. A lot of the rice growers down here in the Delta are growing other crops as well. So they may be harvesting tomatoes right now or potatoes or something else. And they're just waiting to get into their rice until those other things are done or until their moisture gets right.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Up here, Michelle, there was a lot of corn planted, far more corn than usual. Are you seeing a lot of corn down in your area and are people starting to harvest that as well?
SPEAKER_02:They're not starting to harvest the corn yet unless it's silage corn and then they may have already harvested it by now. But in terms of why you're seeing more corn up there, so tomato contracts, they were cut back. So there weren't as many tomato contracts this year or folks that may have had a tomato contract, may have lost a contract from one year to the next. But the other big thing with regard to the Sacramento Valley is that the sunflower industry has basically collapsed in the Sac Valley. And so that was a pretty major cash crop that no longer exists in California. The two main companies that growers contracted with, they both closed down their sunflower programs. And so what I am hearing from seed reps is that a lot of that ground went to corn.
SPEAKER_03:In our area at least. Not in most of our rice ground anyway, but people did use sunflowers as a rotation crops. And even some of our rice growers occasionally use tomatoes when they can get the acreage contract in their rice rotations. So we've been talking a little bit on these farm call questions about blasts or rice disease. And Luis, I think you've been heading up the 2024 Rice Disease Survey. across the rice growing regions of California. Could you talk a little bit about that and the rationale behind it?
SPEAKER_00:Sure. This rice disease survey is done every five years, and we do it so that we can share the data with the Air Resources Board, because part of the requirement to continue to allow rice growers to burn rice straw is to manage disease. And so, you know, if we show that, yes, diseases are still present in the rice, then it's one more reason why growers should be allowed that 25% allowance to burn. And so we've been doing that. We started three, four weeks ago. We still have a couple of counties to survey. And in general, we don't do it every year. So remembering what we had five years ago, it's a little hard. But it seems like there's less disease pressure than previously. We do find the tiller diseases, you know, stem rot and aggregate she-spot in almost every field. It just seems like there's a little bit less than what we had previously. Blast, we haven't found, but maybe three or four fields with just a few panicles. We haven't seen any otherwise. And then smut, we found a few fields with smut, some in Colusa, some in Glen you but much less than what we saw five years ago. And then I'll just add, you know, doing this survey, we're going into these fields and it's just random, but we're trying to hit the same fields we did five years ago. We've noticed that some of these fields, we were seeing quite a bit of armyworm damage. And so, you know, we have that armyworm trapping network and the numbers for this second flight were very low, the number of moths. And then we were surveying some fields as well, and the number of worms that we were seeing was very low. But there, you know, there's still a few fields out there that have, I think, high numbers, you know, so I think you need to scout. You need to get out there and scout your field, even though all the fields might have very low numbers. It can be spotty.
SPEAKER_03:I'm glad you mentioned that, Luis. I went out with you to the Glen and Colusa and the YOLO samplings, and that was something I noticed. They were some very large armyworms, and they were pretty active. There was defoliation in almost every single field we went to. Not high levels, but certainly noticeable. So that was something I wasn't expecting to see towards the end of September, but there it was.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and you always find armyworms. You know, it's just the last worms. But yeah, it's the panicle injury that growers and PCAs need to be aware of.
SPEAKER_04:Hey, Luis, I have a question for you. Do you think that the reason you might be seeing less blast is that growers are growing M210 where there is blast? It
SPEAKER_00:could be. You know, we don't know the varieties when we go into a field. So it could be that we're looking at M210. But also, just from talking to PCAs, you know, I think a lot of them know that I'm interested in finding blasts and taking samples, you know, to add to my collection. And, you know, I've gotten a couple of leads where they you know they tell me oh we we've seen blast here and you know i go check it out and and it's not blast so i think yeah there's there's definitely less blast this year than last year and maybe very little blast this year.
SPEAKER_03:Does that kind of correlate with the information you're getting from your leaf wetness sensors that you have placed throughout the region?
SPEAKER_00:That's a good question. I don't know because this is the first time we've done it. We found that there are certain amount of hours that would allow infection during the season. I don't know if last year it might have been much more hours than this year. I think this is going to have to be a process where we do this several years and then some of those years we see some more blasts and we can make some conclusions. But there were certainly some dates where we had good conditions for blast infection. And there was a little bit of blast that I saw in Glynn County, so the pathogen was a around. So like I said, we need to do this more years to get a better feeling of you know, at what point that leaf wetness means more blast.
SPEAKER_03:That's a great point. Switching gears a little bit, we had a pretty long stretch of heat earlier this summer around July, some really like a long stretch of over 110 degree days really. And a question I've been hearing relatively often is how is that going to affect the varieties that are a little bit more susceptible to chalkiness with the high temperatures? Bruce, would you Care to kind of touch on that a little bit?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, I don't think we're going to see an effect so much on chalkiness for a couple reasons. The big heat that we saw was in July, maybe sprinkling a little bit into August. But usually for chalkiness, it's those temperatures during grain fill that are really important. And I know we have seen some fairly warm temperatures even during grain fill period, but our nighttime temperatures have been low, typically less than 65 And you really need temperatures in excess of 70, 75 before you really start to see chalk. So I don't think it's going to have a huge impact on chalk this year.
SPEAKER_03:Great. Thanks for clarifying on that, Bruce. And now here's kind of the question of all questions is, what are we hearing about yields so far? We haven't had a lot of fields harvested yet. And I know at least on our and the people I've been talking to haven't been the most satisfied with the yields that they are hearing. I'm not really hearing a lot of numbers, but people right now are a little bit uncomfortable. Is that kind of the feeling you guys are getting when you talk to people who are harvesting?
SPEAKER_00:I've only talked to one person. Good yields, field harvested early last week, then same grower, another field. late last week and good yields as well. And this grower told me that he'd heard on the west side, yeah, people were a little disappointed that they were seeing yields maybe, I think he said 10% down or something like that. These early fields, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, that's pretty much what I've been hearing. Here on the west side, people are a little disheartened, but it's good to hear, I guess, that a little bit further east, it's not yet anyway, not hearing much.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, well, it's just, you know, sample size is one.
SPEAKER_04:Well... I've talked to a few, and I've heard, every time I talk to a grower, I'm asking what their yields are. And I've talked to them around the valley, including on the east side. I've only had... I think it's probably seven or eight different growers or kind of communications. And I would say one of them was getting decent yields, like maybe similar or higher than last year. All the rest were lower. And that included people in Butte County as well as further south.
SPEAKER_03:Any difference, I guess, just quickly between any of those growers, like no-till or dry-seeded or drills or whatever, pretty much a big range?
SPEAKER_04:These were all conventional, water-seeded. I mean, yeah, and a mix of varieties, some M211, 209, 206, 105.
SPEAKER_03:Well, that's up here in the north. Michelle, what are you hearing down south?
SPEAKER_02:I'm not hearing much yet. There are some growers who have started harvesting, but I would say most probably are barely started or not started at all. So to Louisa's sample size of one, my sample size is zero. So take it for what it's worth. You can ask me the question in a future podcast.
SPEAKER_03:We'll come back to you on that.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I harvested my plots out of the drill seeded. trial we have at the station today and good yields. I was surprised. Yeah. Higher than Bruce's. What? Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:We beat you. How did you beat us? I don't know. I... So we saw... It looked a little thin. Yeah, I was actually surprised looking at the no-till stuff in the... where it was fallowed the previous year. Our yields were good. Yeah. What did you get?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, I'm
SPEAKER_04:still at, you know, pounds per plot, so... The highest we got was around 34, 35, and those were giving us 95 sacks, which I thought was really good.
SPEAKER_00:Hold on, let me hear. I've got the... Yeah, 34 is probably our highest.
SPEAKER_04:So I think that's going to give you yields around 95 sacks, which is good. Yeah, which is really good. Yeah, I was really pleased to see that. We harvested... our nitrogen trials last week and got in the no-till 95 sacks, which if you go to the strict no-till, it was down from that, but yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think my low is like 16 pounds. Yeah, so some of them are pretty low, but yeah, the summer prep did pretty good.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, really impressed with it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:Very clean too. I will say while we're on the topic of yields, Ray harvested the first variety trial over the weekend and decent yields. That was encouraging. Not super high, not super low, but it was better than last year, but last year was down, I think. Yeah.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, well, and then we would have to see like what the 206 and the 211 did, you know, because you got all those specialty varieties in there, then, you know, pull the yield down.
SPEAKER_03:Whitney, I'm sorry, I skipped over you. What have you been hearing about yields?
SPEAKER_01:I actually haven't heard anything from anybody yet. So I'm also with Michelle as a sample size of zero at this point in time.
SPEAKER_03:We'll stay tuned for hear more.
SPEAKER_04:Can I ask you guys a question? So I'm looking at the USDA heart harvest reports for California. And so the week ending yesterday, they're saying that in California, we have 20% of the rice area harvested. That seems really high to me. I would have said maybe 10. Yeah. But am I maybe a lot happened over the weekend?
SPEAKER_03:I mean, I was driving around in this area this weekend, and I don't think I would say 20. I would have put it like, I don't know, 8, 12%. I
SPEAKER_01:do know some folks that are harvesting over here, but I don't know how far they are. I don't know. I couldn't give it necessarily a percentage, but I do know people have started. So maybe there was a lot of... Yeah, I
SPEAKER_00:think... It seemed, yeah. I thought it'd be more like 10, too.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, 20% just seemed high, but maybe...
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think it's less than that because, you know, with doing the survey, I'm always worried like, oh my God, they're going to start harvesting and we're not going to find any fields. And yeah, there's very few fields where we're being harvested. I think 20 seems like too much.
SPEAKER_03:We'll see what they say next week. For anyone who's interested in hearing more from any of these lovely folks here on the call, why don't we go around and offer our contact information and then once more kind of the area we cover just to make that super clear. So starting north again, Luis, you want to go off?
SPEAKER_00:Yes. So my cell phone, 530-635-6234. That's the best way to contact me. Call, text, works for me.
SPEAKER_03:Great. And again, my name is Sarah Marsh. I cover Colusa YOLO. You can email me at smarsh, M-A-R-S-H, like the swamp, at ucanr.edu. And my phone number, you can call or text, is 530-635-6234. 302038585.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, and I'm Whitney. Reminder, I cover Sutter Yuba, Placer, and Sacramento counties. And my email is w, and my last name is super long, so wbremdaforest, which you might have to Google, at ucnr.edu, or you can call my office at 530-822-7515. And I'm
SPEAKER_04:Bruce Lindquist, and you can call me at my cell at 530-902-2943. Or text me. Text is best. Don't leave a voicemail.
SPEAKER_02:And I'm Michelle Leinfelder-Miles. I can be reached at the San Joaquin County Cooperative Extension Office, 209-953-6120. And if you want to email me, that's fine too, but I have a long last name like Whitney, so just Google it.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, great. All right. Thanks, you guys, so much.
UNKNOWN:Thank you.
SPEAKER_03:For more information about our resources, you can find all of these linked in the show notes below. Thanks for listening to Thoughts Rice, a UC Cooperative Extension podcast from UC Agriculture and Natural Resources. You can find out more about this podcast on our website, thoughtsonrice.buzzsprout.com. We'd love to hear from you, whether it's from using the text link in our show notes, a survey submission on our feedback form, also in the show notes, or from leaving a comment on our podcast on any of your streaming services of choice. You can also email us with any comments, questions, or suggestions at thoughtsonrice.ucdavis.edu. Stay safe out there during harvest and remember, like the growers like to say, have a rice life. Mention of an agrochemical does not constitute a recommendation, merely the sharing of research findings. Always follow the label. The label is the law. Find out more at ipm.ucanr.edu. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent the views, thoughts, and opinions of the University of California. The material and information presented here is for general purposes only. The University of California name and all forms and abbreviations are the property of its owner and its use does not imply endorsement of or opposition to any specific organization, product or service.
