ARLINGTON, VA – The
latest episode of
The Rice Stuff podcast takes a deep dive into the work of USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) that provides vital information for the agriculture community and markets around the world.
“Decisions about agriculture are going to be made with or without information,” explained Tony Dorn, chief of NASS’s Environmental, Economics and Demographics Branch on the episode. “The statistics we produce provide that information and give farmers a chance to report on what is really happening in agriculture, for policymakers, lenders, and other farmers.”
Dorn was joined by Michael Klamm, deputy regional director of NASS’s Delta Region – Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi; and Lance Honig, chief of NASS’s Crops Branch, to both thank growers who take the time to participate in their data collection and to urge even greater participation in the upcoming Census of Agriculture that will be launched next month.
Klamm explained why good participation from the rice community is so critical saying, “All accurate data is very important, but [looking at the 2017 Census] we had almost 305,000 farms that grew corn and 303,000 farms that grew soybeans. Almost 105,000 farms grew wheat and we had 4,637 farms that grew rice, so we really need our rice producers to fill out these surveys.”
Honig talked about how farmers and others can and should make use of the data published by the agency on an almost daily basis.
Arkansas’ U.S. Senator John Boozman also joined the episode to talk about the upcoming Farm Bill, cost of production issues, global bad actors impacting rice prices, and more.
Boozman is currently the Ranking Member of the Senate Agriculture Committee and would be poised to chair the Committee should Republicans take back the Senate in November.
“The good news is traditionally Farm Bills aren't about Democrats or Republicans. It's about regions of the country, it's about commodities,” he said. “You get a good Farm Bill by listening to producers working in a nonpartisan manner and then trying to figure out how we develop the safety net we need.”
On the topic of the farm safety net, Boozman acknowledged the somewhat unique challenges facing the rice industry and went on to say that agriculture and the world were relatively stable the last time a Farm Bill was created, but that’s not the case today. “As it has been since the pandemic began, it's going to take everybody working together to figure this out such that we can continue to have the safest, cheapest, food of any country in the world. That truly is the goal.”
New episodes of
The Rice Stuff are published on the second and fourth Tuesday of every month and can be found on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and online at
www.thericestuffpodcast.com.