Fred Zaunbrecher has been a rice farmer for 40 years. He says he’s not foreign to Louisiana's warm and moist climate, which is conducive to the growth of bacteria or fungus.
"We had dry weather for most of the growing season and then it started raining, and after it started raining, the diseases started proliferating," Zaunbrecher said.
According to Adam Famoso, with the H. Rouse Caffey Rice Research Station, the 2024 season has been one of the most difficult seasons for rice farmers.
"Rice season in 2024 started out promising," Famoso said. "We had great growing conditions. A lot of folks thought it would be a record year."
One of the main issues is that fungicides used to control diseases on crops are no longer working.
“It's getting to the point where we used to be able to rely on the rice fungicides and we can’t anymore," Zaunbrecher expalined. "We really need the chemical company to step up and develop something.”
Famoso says this year, and the last few years, rice farmers have been impacted by a disease called smut. This disease gets on the kernel of the rice, giving off a black dust, which affects the quality. Famoso told KATC this is not the only disease impacting farmers.
“A relatively new disease called Cercospora, which affects on the stem. It makes some of the grains be empty, and in worse cases, the whole head falls off the plant onto the ground,” Famoso said.
With no way to control the spread of these diseases, Zaunbrecher's yield took a hit.
“In some of those fields, it was over 1500 pounds an acre, so that’s quite a yield loss and that was all due to the different diseases that we had,” Zaunbrecher expalined.
Experiencing such a loss could affect farmers in the future.
“If you can’t pay your bills from the previous year, the lending institutions aren’t going to give you enough money to operate because they want their investment back from the year before,” Zaunbrecher said.
Zaunbrecher says he hopes in the future farmers will have fungicides they can count on.
