Lessons From the Delta, Part 1: What Midwestern Farmers Can Learn From Southern Agriculture

[00:00:00] Irrigation Starts Here
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Aaron Shew: Even somebody that farms, corn or soybeans, you come into rice, there’s a lot of work, like you got levees to pull, you got irrigation to manage. It’s a lot more complex. But rice on rice helps minimize some of that overhead over time. But in two pockets in Arkansas where we have cones of depression, where I think there are five rice farmers in Arkansas at the end of the 19th century. And then of course now we grow anywhere between 1.3 and 1.5 million acres of rice every year.

Colson Tester: 50 some percent of the nation’s rice

Chad Fiechter: Whoa. Wow.

Aaron Shew: 50% of the country’s rice is produced here. But those two kinds of depression are where the original rice farms were in Arkansas, the Grand Prairie Region Catch River Valley. So a lot of new water management practices are being adopted. You’re seeing some of the rice on rice dissipate.

Colson Tester: By cones of depression he means the groundwater is becoming further and further down. There’s less and less of it. It’s further down. It’s more costly to pump.

Aaron Shew: If everybody’s putting straws in the pond and sucking it up, then it’s eventually gonna go dry. Who’s whose straw goes dry first depends on where you’re at. And so it’s a true public goods problem.​

Chad Fiechter: Welcome to the Purdue Commercial AgCast. This is Chad Fiechter. And Todd and I had mentioned in a previous episode that we had this project last summer where we spent some time in the Mississippi Delta, specifically in Arkansas, talking with farmers, advisors, researchers and industry leaders about what they’re seeing. What’s working, what’s changing, and what might be surprising to Midwestern grain farmers.

This special series, Lessons from the Delta, is what we learned.

We’ve broken it up into several episodes and what you’ll hear is a lot of conversations that we had as we were driving around the Delta. Some of ’em are in the truck, in fields, conversations that popped up about managing risk, the challenges around water, labor, and capital, in ways that look different than what we’re familiar with in the Midwest.

Our goal isn’t to compare the two regions but it’s to ask questions where we can try to learn a little bit more about how production systems are built when the constraints are a little bit different. What we saw challenges conceptions of Midwestern farming, specifically around irrigation and the risk that’s managed.

So this is episode One.

[00:02:15] Why the Delta Matters
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Chad Fiechter: As a farm kid. We are the Eastern Corn Belt. I saw that there’s nuances to the place that I farm that are really specific. So don’t lump me in with the central Illinois folks or the Iowa folks. I’m an Eastern Corn Belt guy, so don’t, don’t like, don’t characterize me with the rest of those guys. Not because there’s anything wrong. It’s just like, no, no. My challenges are different than everybody else.

So in the back of my mind, there’s been these big places that I have fascinations in. So like Brazil is one that someday I need a pilgrimage to Brazil to understand what is Brazil like, what is Argentina like, right? Another place would be Ukraine. Within the United States, one of those being the Mississippi Delta. And so there’s a lot about the Mississippi Delta that I don’t know, but we talk about it broadly ag circles, they grow corn and soybeans, right? Different culture, different ideas.

So where we went is into the Mississippi Delta in Arkansas. Primarily visited a bunch of things related to rice production. So farms, extension personnel, uh, farmland investors in Arkansas.

Todd Kuethe: We went to a couple of research institutes.

So, we talked to not just economists, we talked mostly to physical scientists that study irrigation, pest management. Uh, we had a really nice conversation with a agricultural engineer. So the kind of technology for moving water was a big part of that conversation, but also the technology of dealing with pests or things I think are kind of universal to farming. But the things that are unique about the commodities they produce and where they produce them.

Okay, so you’re, you were sort of, it was this mythical place to you that you wanted to learn more about?

Chad Fiechter: No. no. 100%. We got to taking this trip because we have these great friends. Who are willing to, to take us around.

Todd Kuethe: So we have these two friends who we do research with them. So they work for a company called Acres is where Aaron works and a company called Acre Trader. And they were like, you guys should come see the delta sometime. And you were like, I’m on it. You tell us. Let’s find the dates.

And then Aaron, who was one of our hosts, was also, he’s the one that set up this great itinerary for us. But he was like, we need some dates. You could do these dates, you could do these other dates, which to tease some of the things we experienced had to do with mosquitoes.

Chad Fiechter: 100%.

Todd Kuethe: If you go too early, there’s not gonna be rice in the ground to look at. We don’t wanna go in the winter unless you want hunt ducks.

So we had a, a good host that would say like, oh, we can show you this stuff. We went to some of their farms that their investment farm owns. But Aaron was also an extension economist, at the University of Arkansas and at Arkansas State. So he had all the connections to the extension folks, but also one of his former students now works at Ducks Unlimited. And he went around with us and talked to us about the interface between rice production and the natural environment, particularly ducks. So duck hunting is a big thing.

[00:05:07] A Different Agricultural Model
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Chad Fiechter: We’re gonna insert some clips from Aaron and Colson giving us a little more explanation of what the Mississippi Delta is, the scale of rice production, how flat the train is, and this idea that they do precision leveling to help manage rice production.

Todd Kuethe: Can you tell us a little bit about who you are?

Aaron Shew: Aaron Shew, I was a professor of agricultural economics at University of Arkansas, and I studied a lot of different crops. Mostly worked in production economics, my main crop of interest was rice being Arkansas. So I spent the better part of about 10 years, between graduate school and being a professor studying the economics of rice. Now I work at a software company called Acres and we focus on valuation and buying and selling of land.

And Colson works at a company called Acre Trader.

Colson Tester: Yes, I work at Acre Trader, which is a, we’re a land investment company, based outta Fayetteville, Arkansas. That is the sister company to Acres. And we focus on investing in productive agricultural ground. We have a base of retail investors that invest in our platform. And we buy and make long-term investments in farm ground throughout the U.S. So we own quite a few rice, soybean, cotton, corn farms in the Delta, where we are today. We’re about to go look at two of those farms. And then we own ground in the Southeast, all throughout the Midwest, and quite a bit in the Pacific Northwest as well.

 

Chad Fiechter: What defines the delta in your mind?

Aaron Shew: There’s a huge history in the, the mid south Mississippi River Delta, the Mississippi River Alluvial Plane. The MAP, is the acronym that’s often or the MRVA for the Mississippi River Valley. Um, and that’s generally gonna start in Cairo, Illinois and go all the way south to where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico. Obviously geographical significance to that, though the river itself widens out, you get a very unique terrain, it’s flat, right, compared to once you get to Cairo, Illinois.

Todd Kuethe: So Cairo is where the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers are. So we’re not far from Memphis, Tennessee. So in Arkansas, how far west of the river can I be? And you still consider it the delta?

Aaron Shew: Probably probably about Searcy, Arkansas. Think of it like it’s roughly, it’s third eastern. Third. Yeah. Eastern. Eastern. Third, third, Little, Little Rock east. So put a dart in the middle of the state, move, you know, directly east, about 40 miles and you’re in the Delta.

Todd Kuethe: I study farmland markets and people that were interested in investing farmland as a, a like investment asset for for a while really hot on the Delta. And the argument they were making is you can plant three four different commodities and and you can let the annual variation in the economics, costs and returns of those commodities dictate what you do as opposed

to

the corn belt where we have two, maybe three commodities that you could do with that land. And so if farmers here plant anything. They didn’t to worry about making money, right? They just plant ’cause that’s they like do. They would still plant rice, that rice still what they’d prefer to do?

Colson Tester: So broadly of the Delta a geographic region. That thesis holds true, maybe that’s a reason that historically land stable other parts of the country. But a farm to farm basis, I don’t think that, there’s not that much crop optionality, in my opinion. So like these heavy soils, you’re typically confined a growing rice and soybeans. You have optionality cotton and corn, you’re not gonna do either. You’re pretty much pretty stuck with two, two crops there. Then you move to lighter sandier soils, most of those guys are corn, cotton, soybeans.

But but the switching costs between being somebody grows cotton and somebody that doesn’t cotton is incredibly expensive. So in order to grow cotton, you gotta buy a cotton picker, and that costs 600,000 plus probably. So guys are typically married to growing cotton. Guys who grow rice, rice, and it’s that easy to switch. So on a farm to farm basis that necessarily holds true.

I’d say the difference between here and Midwest is a lot of guys here are operating thousands, if not of thousands acres, and they’re spread over pretty wide geography, so they moving equipment a lot. Equipment’s dispersed around. More than I see guys Midwest.

Chad Fiechter: Talk about scale. ’cause that’s, that’s different. What do what do you mean by that? Like, geographically dispersed. They grow a lot in one area or? Talk about the farmers that are here.

Aaron Shew: Both and. There farmers obviously with less than a few thousand acres, but I mean, most people that are farming rice farming multiple thousands of acres at least. And they’re the bigger operators, uh, are even into the, into the 15 to 25,000 acre range. So yeah, just to that point, you basically move your equipment all year, field to field, and always something you need your equipment for.

Chad Fiechter: What’s the, what’s the, like machinery bottleneck in rice? Like is it combine capacity, is it ability to get it sprayed? Is it planting?

Aaron Shew: I don’t know that it’s so much equipment. As it is weather. Feel like weather is probably the biggest

Colson Tester: Maybe levees and dirt work. If anything.

Aaron Shew: Levees and dirt work.

Chad Fiechter: Because that, because you have to do that before you plant, so you got that.

Aaron Shew: A lot of rice farmers burn stubble. I think research is really mixed, but rice straw has really high silica content and I’m not a soil scientist, uh, by any means, but I think there’s debate among soil scientists even that, hey if you till in that high silica straw, it doesn’t break down well and it inhibit nitrogen other uptake. It’s pretty thick. I mean, if go through a a rice cut, lot of, of organic matter, right, leftover.

Chad Fiechter: More than like a wheat field? You been Yeah.

Aaron Shew: Okay. Yeah. More than that. And it doesn’t break down like wheat stubble does because of the silica in it. And so people will burn it off. Um,

Todd Kuethe: And do you mean like burn, like fire or burn, like chemical?

Aaron Shew: No, burn fire. Yeah And so like, I mean, it’s, they’re big fires.

Chad Fiechter: And what would be the other, like, like you would try to harvest that biomass and do something with it, or what, what else, what other options do you have?

Aaron Shew: I’m not sure that the research is super solid that it won’t break down, and there are some really innovative, uh, that are experimenting with other, otherwise they’re trying to till it planning and doing experiments on yield to see how much changes.

[00:12:30] Water Shapes Everything
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Todd Kuethe: So turning your irrigation off. So let’s through how irrigation works.

Aaron Shew: Mm-hmm. So generally, is it coming from a spring or like a, it’s all groundwater. I mean, of course years, this year we get enough rain that it’ll stay flooded until early July. Um, and you got, you’re trying to keep it roughly around four inches. Could be, could be less at sometimes. And there’s some methods that are increasingly adopted, like alternating, wetting and drying. So they’ll flood it up for a while and then let it drain back down over a few weeks. Save water. Improves greenhouse gas emissions, things of that nature. But when they do irrigate, it’s generally groundwater from the alluvial aquifer. So hundreds of feet under us big aquifers. Uh, they’ll pump it up. In pump like this and spill out And then they’ll often pipes that run out to risers where you can see there’s a levee there. There’s kind of a raised to section off the field. That’s how they help manage the water depth across a varied terrain. Uh, or in our case here, it’s, it’s actually, uh, been leveled so that it’s a very specific, uh, depth everywhere. But they’ll have risers even running thousands of feet. So even though, we’re probably, it’s a long way over there, it’s like a mile across these fields, and you could have risers where this pump actually pumps water underground through a pipe and it rises and dumps out in that field.

Todd Kuethe: What’s that cost like per acre? And how often do you have do it, do you know?

Colson Tester: So it all depends on the level, how unlevel it was before. So on this farm. I think this farm, we spent somewhere between four and $500,000 on leveling to do three to 400 acres. Okay.

Todd Kuethe: Okay?

Colson Tester: So a thousand, 1500 bucks an acre. Um, and you don’t have to do it often, but you do have to true it up sometimes. So over time, dirt moves around, you have to come in and clean it up a little bit, but that $1,500 an acre cost is a one time expenditure.

Chad Fiechter: So, so how level are we talking? Is this like. Tennis court level, or we got a couple inches of variation.

Colson Tester: So this side of the road, we didn’t come in a level, it was already done as already what we’d call graded. So it’s the whole field slopes a certain direction. Typically at like a, I don’t they call it at a 10th. Yeah. I don’t know what a 10th, what metric that is.

Okay.

Aaron Shew: very light. It’s like don’t even know, a hundred feet or something like

Todd Kuethe: So like, like a less than like a railroad.

Colson Tester: moves, right? it looks very flat.

Todd Kuethe: No, it looks super flat. It all looks like way

Colson Tester: On this side of the road. We came in and precision leveled it. So the entire field is at the same elevation.

Chad Fiechter: Oh, and

Aaron Shew: The reason for that is that like the premier way to grow rice, and we’ll get back to the pumping water question in a second with this, but like the premier way to grow rice is rice on rice. So, um, just in terms of managing a field and an operation, you know, when, generally when even somebody that farms, say they have a background in farming, corn or soybeans, um. You come into rice, there’s a lot of work, like you got levees to pull, you got irrigation to manage. It’s a lot more complex. All of your herbicides change, right? Because a lot of herbicides are not sprayed in rice. They’re water. Deployed.

Chad Fiechter: Oh,

Todd Kuethe: Oh. Cool

Aaron Shew: So there’s a lot of, like, you have to know a lot and it’s often a lot more work.

I mean, the new technologies in rice are like, Hey, how do we automate the irrigation coming on and off? You know? ’cause I don’t wanna get up at 2:00 AM and have to drive 10 miles to my field. Um, but rice on rice helps minimize some of that overhead, right? Uh, over time, but in some places, not here, but it, there are two pockets in Arkansas.

Where we have cones of depression, where we’ve been, you know, rice has been ar or I think there are five rice farmers in Arkansas at the end of the 19th century. And then of course now we have, we grow, I don’t know, anywhere between 1.3 and 1.5 million acres of rice every year.

Colson Tester: 50 some percent of the nation’s rice

Chad Fiechter: Whoa.

Wow.

Aaron Shew: 50% of the country’s rice is produced here. But those two kinds of depression. You know, are often, that’s where the original rice farms were in Arkansas, the Grand Prairie Region Catch River Valley. And, um, so a lot of new water management practices are being adopted. You’re seeing some of the rice on rice dissipate

Colson Tester: By cones of depression. He means the groundwater is

Aaron Shew: Yeah.

Colson Tester: Becoming further and further down. It’s harder.

Todd Kuethe: Ah,

Chad Fiechter: Oh,

Colson Tester: There’s less and less of it. It’s further down. It’s more costly to pump.

Aaron Shew: Yeah. Thank you. That’s a good, very good point. If everybody’s putting straws in the pond and Yeah. Sucking it up, then it’s eventually gonna go dry. Who’s whose straw goes dry first. Yeah. Depends on where you’re at. And so it’s a true public goods problem. Um, so

Chad Fiechter: Because there’s no, you can drill anywhere? You can, you can stick a well okay.

Aaron Shew: Arkansas’s one of the few places where. Yeah, pretty much. If you want a well, you pay for it and put it in.

Chad Fiechter: Yeah.

Aaron Shew: Um, but people are paying more attention. I mean, you blow a, well, uh, you blow a pump in the bottom of well, and it costs you five 10 grand or more to replace than

Colson Tester: Yeah, new well costs 30 to 50 thousand.

Aaron Shew: Okay. Yeah. That’s I expensive.

Colson Tester: Probably more when you get to the cones of depression where it’s deeper to get to groundwater.

Chad Fiechter: The Delta agricultural model is built largely on irrigation and the water scarcity and and challenges around water are reshaping how they think through it.

Todd Kuethe: Colson, tell us about the soil or the dirt, whatever you guys call it here.

Colson Tester: So Chad was asking about running a lot of track tractors here, and a lot of that is because, especially in rice production, you are working with very heavy clay soils. So what we call sharky clay or alligator clay is great for producing rice ’cause it doesn’t drain well.

Chad Fiechter: Okay.

Colson Tester: But it’s also drain well. So that’s why you have lots track tractors. Very soil. And then asking about why our soybeans planted?

Chad Fiechter: So driving I this a big field that’s gotta be 60 80 acres of, of soybeans planted on top of ridges,

Aaron Shew: Furrows.

Chad Fiechter: Furrows. What? What are we doing there?

Aaron Shew: So, it, it comes back to that soil question. So soybeans like corn does not like wet feet. Soybeans will tolerate it more than corn will. Okay. But because our, our soils, especially in these fairly level fields, you can see the water standing between the soybean furrows. So creating those furrows gives a little bit of, uh. It’ll help ’em dry out faster, even though it’s still got that heavy clay soil. Um, so that’s, that’s how we grow a lot of soybeans.

Chad Fiechter: So those are those 30 inch rows? Is that

Aaron Shew: I’m guessing that’s probably. I, I almost wanted to say 36 inch rows there.

Chad Fiechter: Do you plant rice in rows or you just scatter seed?

Aaron Shew: Both.

Um, so there are some that even air seed rice, so that’s kind of crazy. They’ll, they’ll actually fly the seed on.

Chad Fiechter: No way.

Aaron Shew: I don’t think it’s super widely adopted. But now with hybrids it’s almost always drilled in. But a lot of this is not.

Colson Tester: So this is another field that we precision leveled. And if you notice, you don’t see a bunch of levees down through this field.

Aaron Shew: Yeah, it’s

Colson Tester: Like it’s very uniform. If you see a field that’s unleveled. Or just kinda roughly graded, you’ll see tons of levees and they won’t be straight, they’ll be

Chad Fiechter: So is that. That, that’s like kind of, uh, this is not the way to say it, but like, poor man’s leveling. Like you can kind of like keep, you don’t you don’t have to level it all to

Colson Tester: And it’s it’s operationally

Aaron Shew: Way more efficient.

Colson Tester: More efficient for the farmer.

Chad Fiechter: Sure. ’cause you’re not playing around.

Aaron Shew: You’re trading labor, Right? So whenI would say it’s very expensive and hard to produce rice, it’s, it’s, it’s that, or more, it can be more capital intensive. So in this case, you’re trading having to pull brand new levies every year for, hey, I’m go ahead and spend a couple hundred thousand up front and level it out so we don’t have to pull levees.

Todd Kuethe: Oh, so you’d have to remove the levy to harvest.

That’s

Aaron Shew: right.

Todd Kuethe: Oh my godness.

Aaron Shew: Not necessarily to harvest, but here’s we’re going by break ’em

Colson Tester: Now see this is a graded field. This is one a precision than notice the the levee snakes back through the field.

Chad Fiechter: Okay. So, so are you like, is this a folk thing? Like where if you’re an old rice farmer, you can just look at a field and know where to stick those levees? ‘Cause I mean, we’re talking those, those things don’t take a normal path or is that, uh, you use a software program to tell you where to go.

Aaron Shew: Most people are doing that now.

Chad Fiechter: Okay.

Aaron Shew: I’ve got up friend up here, Richard Pickett, that he was one of our grad students when I was in A State and, uh, got super into drones, um, specifically flying Lidar over fields. And so he runs, he’s been in this business now for, I don’t know, 5, 5, 7 years flying drones over fields, getting calculations. And both precision level for contouring.

Chad Fiechter: You would’ve just drug. What do you, I mean, assuming it looks like a kind kind of a vase thing that you kind of dragged drag up sort of a, a furrow?

Aaron Shew: Right.

Chad Fiechter: How about evaporation of water? So if the rice that we were looking at a foot tall and you four inches of water on the ground, how much of water soaking in versus being evaporated versus just stagnant?

Aaron Shew: Mostly gonna run off. All of this land drains through various slews and tributaries the Mississippi River. And so therein lies uh, this is perpetual problem in the Mississippi River Delta for the past hundred 30 years, like keeping water on you want it, keeping water off everywhere you don’t want it. It the, uh, THE problem. So mid hundreds, the delta was primarily old growth forest. And swampy old growth forest. And folks Lee Wilson came and they, they logged tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of acres. They built railroads. Initially they started with mules, and then they, they moved to railroads. And water became, you water management and getting water off became a huge problem. They started engineering lots of new tributaries and created water management districts where collaborated to, to build slews that all fed over to just massive irrigation management projects. Large amounts of human capital spent to get water off.

But also at the time, they’d logged everything, most of the value of forest gone. People had here. A place like Wilson, Arkansas started, they started producing row crops. And rice became one of those crops that was introduced because, hey, it’s a swamp. Rice likes water. Let’s see what we do.

Um, but when there’s excess water on the fields, hope, in fact, and and I don’t know how much of this goes into Acre Trader’s valuations, I know farmers, a lot of what they’re gonna look for when evaluate a is It’s you get water on how do you get off? So if everything floods, if your slew or your outlet how quickly does it drain back down? Because again, rice, while it likes water, doesn’t wanna be underwater very long.

Chad Fiechter: So I just someone with a pond their, like their house.

Aaron Shew: Oh yeah.

Chad Fiechter: Is that a, that’s a normal thing. People dig ponds for recreation?

Aaron Shew: For sure. Ponds for recreation. And then something else see at the Rice Center and one the big projects, one best last big I worked on over here on, uh, surface reservoirs, which we’ve been talking about water, we a lot of water the off season. The it’s, built the to drain off for the most part, and so, and then it dries up about right now, it’ll dry up and then have to use groundwater until of season. So been some pretty major investment over the years, initially, privately, but now there’s subsidies there Quip and CSP. To build, know, to take 10, 20 40 acres of production, a surface reservoir for recreation, also irrigation. And so capturing all that rainfall during wet season, and you can then cycle that your fields production. And then you groundwater or less of it.

Todd Kuethe: So as two midwest ag economists, can you give us the rice production year or calendar year? Right now it’s mid-June.

Aaron Shew: Yeah. So around here, you’re generally gonna plant around May. Depending a variety and else. But roughly between it May to September average.

Todd Kuethe: How tall does the rice get? Like will it get much taller than what we’re seeing now?

Aaron Shew: Yeah. 3 feet roughly. Um, you get varieties, uh, that are a bit shorter. Call anywhere two, two. And a a half feet at the shortest. You again, in Arkansas you’re not gonna see anything probably three and a half be the but you go overseas, uh, rice that’s, uh, like seven tall in some places.

Todd Kuethe: Oh, wow.

[00:26:02] What Surprised Us Most
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Todd Kuethe: So, Chad, what surprised you while you were there?

Chad Fiechter: I was surprised by how similar farmers are, not in the sense that you can characterize ’em all the same, but they seem to also be really deep in the weeds of their thing. All of them could have given us a clear explanation of how you grow rice and why they do it this way. And I love that. I think that was, that was, that was probably the part, maybe like I was surprised at how much I was surprised.

Todd Kuethe: So, uh, a couple things surprised me. The first is, I didn’t realize how beautiful it would be. So it’s, it’s in insanely flat. But there the flatness was like beautiful. Like the sky was like infinite. And the sun, it felt like we were like literally feet from the sun all the time. Like it felt like we’re like in the Caribbean. It was like we woke up and the sun was on us. We went to bed at night. The sun was on us somehow still. It was like just infinite sun. Totally flat, but just lush and green. A cool looking breeze often. Big clouds. So I was, I was shocked by the beauty of it.

My other surprising thing was, what growing rice is. ‘Cause I have never once thought about it. I eat rice and I thought about it a little bit. Like there’s this sort of cliche in the ag sector where it’s like people don’t really know what we’re doing here. And like that was definitely true of me with rice.

In fact, one of the things that jumped out at me, the things I’ll remember for a long time is when we were at one of the research experiments stations, one of the researchers said, It’s the dairy of crop production. Meaning you’re always tinkering, you’re always making adjustments. You’re measuring something multiple times a day and making adjustments based on the natural climate. What’s current, like if there’s a rain that comes through, you’ve gotta adjust your watering practices.

We talked to a number rice farmers and, and people around rice. I was under the impression that the farmers there loved rice. So I often ask if you didn’t have to worry about the, like, financial part of this, you’re just growing ’cause you enjoy it, what are you gonna grow? I feel like most farmers around here in Indiana will answer corn. I’m only planting soybeans or wheat ’cause of like agronomic or economic reasons. But if this was just purely a hobby, I’m planting corn and I’m watching the corn and I’m doing stuff in the corn. I love corn. So I assume that would be their case with, with rice. So we asked specifically, like if you, if, if that was the case for you, you didn’t have to worry about agronomics, you didn’t have to worry about economics. You could just plant, ’cause this is what you love to do, would you still grow rice? And they were like, Nope.

So hopefully if people are gonna listen to this series, I’m picturing a lot of them being people who don’t grow rice. Maybe they grow corn and soybeans. But there’s so much to learn, like you’re saying, just staying curious. and, and, and taking some of that back home.

Chad Fiechter: That’s part one of our Lessons From the Delta series. So next week we’ll release more of our conversations with Aaron Shew while we were in Arkansas, and you’ll hear more on automation of irrigation and rice economics versus corn and soybeans.

If you’re finding value in this series – we had a lot of fun making it, but hopefully it’s good for you – make sure you subscribe to the Purdue Commercial AgCast so you don’t miss out on what’s coming next, including our regular Ag Economy Barometer insights and future conversations like this one.

We’re also sharing short videos on YouTube from each stop as we were spending time throughout the Delta, so be sure to check those out as well.

Thanks for joining us, and we’ll see you next time.