RICE PRODUCTION IN U.S. AND BOOTHEEL COUNTIES ON THE GROW

Special levee discs are used to throw soil up for small levees in the rice field. The discs are "reversed" following harvest of the rice and used to level the field.

Harvested rice is cleaned, hulled and graded at processing mills. The grain is then placed in bags ready for shipment.

The first rice produced in Missouri was by George Begley Jr. north of Dudley in Stoddard County, records say.

Farm history tells us that Begley planted his rice in 1911 and that most of the early Missouri rice was grown by Arkansas farmers who moved to newly drained and cleared lands in Southeast Missouri.

It wasn't until three-quarters of a century later that the first rice processing plant was established in the state when Louis Dreyfus Group, a worldwide, multi-industry company, started a rice mill operation at the New Madrid County Port.

Both rice growers and rice milling have made great strides in Southeast Missouri.

The state's first rice growers were timber cutters through the late winter months. Lacking machinery to work in wet fields, farmers used much hand labor especially to harvest the rice. During the 1950s and through 1973, the state's total allotted rice acreage varied from 3,000 to 6,000 acres.

That is a far cry from the more than 140,000 acres of rice grown in a half-dozen Bootheel counties today.

Rice allotments were lifted in 1974, and today the Missouri rice acreage ranges from 120,000 to 143,000 acres in 1998.

Louis Dreyfus Group of Paris, France, with U.S. headquarters in Wilton, Conn., was established in 1988 along with a small processing center in McGehee, Ark. The two centers now have a capacity to process more than 450,000 metric tons of rice a year.

The mill at New Madrid, which recently achieved ISO 9002 certification by Lloyd's Register Quality Assurance, one of only a handful of mills to achieve the certification, operates 24 hours a day throughout the year. The company employs between 90 to 100 workers.

Louis Dreyfus has merchandised and traded various bulk agriculture commodities in international markets for more than 150 years, since 1851. The company also owns one of the top-three citrus processing companies in the world, at Winter Garden, Fla., west of Orlando.

Louis Dreyfus' other activities include natural gas exploration and production, shipping, manufacturing, and real estate development and management.

Missouri rice acreage was limited until 1974, but has grown dramatically since rice acreage allotments were eliminated.

Missouri rice acreage increased immediately from 5,000 to more than 100,000 acres in Southeast Missouri. Relatively high prices for rice relative to other crops together with significant government loan support and guarantees made rice production especially attractive through the mid-1990s.

Rice production in Missouri last year totaled a record high 7.4 million hundredweight, up 20 percent from the record year. Farmers planted 143,000 acres in 1998.

The Riceland Foods cooperative grain drying and storage facility in Poplar Bluff has doubled its capacity in the last eight years to almost 1,500,000 bushels of storage. The facility dries, stores and markets close to 2 million bushels of rice.

Arkansas is the top rice-growing state in the nation and sends some of its northern crops to the Riceland Mill at Poplar Bluff Riceland owns the world's largest rice mill at Jonesboro just 80 miles south of Poplar Bluff.

Missouri rice acreage reached 143,000 in 1998, eclipsing the old record of 134,000 acres in 1994.

Improvements in land and equipment have made for better rice production in the state. Land grading, high capacity wells and pumps, larger combines and more and better grain-drying and storage facilities also improve yields and economics of crops grown in rotation.

A wide range of related businesses have grown along with rice production -- precision land surveying and grading, water and erosion control structures, fertilizers and pest controls plus the airplanes and ground equipment to apply them, local grain elevators, and farm equipment sales and maintenance businesses.

In the long term, rice acreage could increase significantly. Suitable soil types and available irrigation water could eventually shove the rice acreages to 300,000.

The two largest rice-producing counties to date have been Butler and Stoddard, which account for more than 100,000 acres each year.

Butler County has produced half or more of the rice grown in Missouri the past two decades and ranks consistently among the top 20 of the 110 rice-producing counties in the U.S. Stoddard County grows almost a third of Missouri's rice, which is also produced in New Madrid, Pemiscot, Ripley and Dunklin counties.

Minor acreages of rice have been in Mississippi, Scott, Bollinger and Cape Girardeau counties.

The number of rice producers in Missouri is estimated at 250 to 350, with over half of them in Butler County.

The Missouri Rice Council owns and operates the 30-acre Missouri Rice Research and Demonstration Farm near Glennonville in northern Dunklin County. The council selects and funds research done on the farm and sponsors more demonstrations and field days each year.

Rice research and extension are also conducted by specialists of Missouri University Extension, the Delta Research Center of the University of Missouri and the Southeast Missouri State University department of agriculture.

The United States produces only about 1 percent of the world's rice. China and India are the world's largest producers of rice, producing more than half of the world's rice.

Legend has it that rice was introduced to the United States in the late 1600s when a storm-damaged ship from Madagascar sought refuge in the harbor at Charleston, S.C. In gratitude for the refuge, the ship's captain presented the governor of the colony a sack of seed rice.

For almost 200 years after that, South Carolina was the nation's leading rice producer.

Today, the primary rice-growing regions are along the Mississippi River in Arkansas and Mississippi, the Sacramento River in California, and the Gulf of Mexico in Texas and Louisiana.

Acreages during a recent year in Missouri:

Butler, 59,700; Dunklin, 2,700; New Madrid, 14,600; Pemiscot, 4,500; Ripley, 4,200; Stoddard, 44,000; and others combined -- Cape Girardeau, Mississippi, Scott and Bollinger -- 1,200.