ISSUE 93, REFLECTIONS, Part 7: Commodity Rice

LSU introduces Rice Variety LA19-22-12

Commodity Rice

At the 2024 Meeting of USA Rice in Little Rock, the current president lamented that 2025 showed little promise for profitability for rice farmers in Arkansas and other states where commodity rice grew. The cost of inputs rises, the weather and disease stresses increase, and the price of long grain and short grain price sinks. The same might be said of other commodity crops: cotton, soybeans, corn, sorghum.

Part of the problem is the anonymity of commodity rice. No consumer asks for a particular variety of long grain rice, except Jasmine and Basmati. Most rice grown in the United States is non-aromatic. Jasmine and Basmati are aromatic, and so have market distinction. To some extent the anonymity of non-aromatic long grain rice is by design. The producers who stock grocery stores want the buyer to think of the brand name, not the rice variety. Riviana Foods, the largest such producer in the United States, wants you to think of Mahatma, Carolina, RiceSelect, Minute, or Tilda. It was interesting to learn that most of the varieties of long grain grown in the fields were recent releases by the breeding programs of southern University that go by release numbers and less frequently names. They are bred for productivity and resistance to the disease or pest of the moment. Some are in production 4 or 5 years, then subbed out for the next numbered release with resistance to the newest virus. The problems of course is that consumers will never associate a positive experience in eating with any particular variety since the variety names are not part of the selling information. Not on the package. With no consciousness, no mystique develops around a type.

The highest desire of a commodity cropper is to plant the newest most productive variety out there and produce so much of it that you can set the price. Vast rewards flow your way. The problem of course is that rice is a global commodity and some places in the world have lower labor costs, fewer diseases challenges, less extreme weather in a given year and sometimes set the price of their rice at a point which would put your farm in the red if you sold it there. If everyone is growing LA19-2212 its just more of the same, a rice grown for agronomic virtues, not because it inspires particular consumer demand.

The market doesn’t have to be that way. The Japanese consumer is quite conscious of the distinct varieties of rice available and their particular virtues; some varieties command higher prices because they are generally perceived to be better tasting or more wholesome. Koshihikari, Hitomebore, Hinohikari, Akitakomachi, Nanatsuboshi, Yumepirika. In the U.S. this variety consciousness is niche, limited to a very few specialty rices: Carolina Gold, Calrose, and the imports—Basmati, Arborio, Jasmine, and the special case of Manoonin, or Wild Rice. Breeders tend not to develop specialty rice, unless there is a medical tie-in, such as the Low Glycemic index rice that LSU developed for people with diabetes, Frontiere. Our differentiation tends to other things: brown rice, white rice, short grain, medium grain, short grain, sweet rice, red rice, black rice.

I remember an old cane syrup brewer telling me, all the old southern cane growers had a syrup pot and a particular variety that they rendered into syrup (green home, blue ribbon, Louisiana purple, white ghost), and the contest among the syrup makers was fierce with much trading of product and much bragging. Yet the bulk of their cane went to make granulated sugar a commodity that operated in the most undifferentiated way. The idea that one kind of cane was more dulcet than the next was repressed by the sugar refining industry. They were fixed on cane sugar > beet sugar. Yet every syrup maker knew from experience that some types were smoother, longer in the mouth, brighter, deeper, more complicated that others. A confectioner once remarked “we pay top dollar for old Criollo chocolate, yet mingle it with commodity grade sugar; if someone could offer me a sugar variety that tasted immediately more interesting than the builk, I would hand my wallet to him.” But I can’t get a grower or a breeder to commit to pursuing the breeding of a cane “more sweeter.”

The mind of a commodity producer is an elaborate set of mind-forged manacles. The strength of the shackles is reinforced by the contracts for herbicides and fungicides and insecticides and combines, and water control, and labor. But if everyone is a “big grower” of LA19-2212, there will be a damn lot of that stuff, and when there’s oversupply, the price goes down down down.

There is more satisfaction in producing something that real people want by name because they’ve heard about or experienced the taste. The special items. Or “specialty rice” in the parlance of the agronomists.