Texas rice farmers cheer as USDA says mosquito-sprayed rice can still be sold organic

By Lynn Brezosky
October 6, 2017 Updated: October 6, 2017 12:04pm

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A tire floats next to a truck flooded by the Brazos River after Tropical Storm Harvey Sept. 1 in Richmond. The organic status of this year’s rice crops in Texas was at risk due to the mass aerial spraying to control mosquitoes hatching eggs in all the standing post-Harvey flood waters in Southeast Texas

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The U.S. Air Force used massive C-130 aircraft to spray post-Harvey flooded parts of Texas with insecticides to prevent mosquitoes from diseases including the Zika virus.

Texas growers of organic rice used for health food favorites like vegan burritos and tofu-vegetable bowls are breathing a sigh of relief now that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has decided the crop has not been compromised by mosquito spraying in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.

While Texas ranks sixth for the nation's overall rice production, it supplies nearly a third of the nation's organic rice. Farmers willing to go through the red tape of getting organic certification find it can bring in about twice as much money as conventional rice. Of the state’s approximately 160,000 acres of rice fields, between 18,000 and 20,000 acres are certified organic. Texas produced $13.7 million of organic rice last year, making it second only to California.

But this year’s organic status was at risk due to the mass aerial spraying to control mosquitoes hatching eggs in all the standing post-Harvey flood waters in Southeast Texas.
Harvey dumped an estimated 34 trillion gallons of rain over southeastern Texas and southwestern Louisiana — about enough to fill Lake Tahoe, a 192-square-mile lake with an average depth of about 1,000 feet. To keep mosquitoes from proliferating into a serious nuisance with the threat of spreading diseases like encephalitis and the Zika and West Nile viruses, the state Department of Health and Human Services and Federal Emergency Management Agency last month enlisted the U.S. Air Force to use massive C-130 aircraft to spray pesticides over hundreds of thousands of acres.

Harvey was devastating to growers in a swath of Texas state stretching north of the Coastal Bend up to the Louisiana coast. While agricultural damages are still being tallied, the storm’s record flooding and wind drowned out about 100,000 acres of rice, stranded 2,500 head of livestock in emergency shelters and took out a cotton gin as well as thousands of acres of the fiber and seed that make for Texas’ top crop. Before Harvey hit, cotton farmers were harvesting a record crop and rice farmers were looking at some of the best yields they’d ever had.

Michael Orrin Way, an entomologist with Texas A&M AgriLife Research Service in Beaumont, estimated that about 20 percent of the state’s primary rice crop, which includes most of the organic, and 50 percent of the ratoon, or second rice crop, was destroyed.

Since organic rice sells for about $20 for every 100 pounds compared with $11 for higher-yield conventional rice, growers were dismayed when the Texas Department of Agriculture’s Organic Certification Program said the USDA wouldn’t allow them to sell what was left of this year’s crop as organic.

“A lot of my growers right now, they’ve lost corn crops, they’ve lost the cotton crop, they’ve lost the soybean crop. Right now all that’s left is rice,” said Steve Samra, a grower and organic consultant, said of that notice. “There’s a lot of question marks and a lot of wiggle room on this. It all boils down to was the grower sprayed or does he know that he has been sprayed? Has it been documented that his field has been sprayed?”

Samra and others urged the state to seek a variance similar to one granted to drought-stricken California organic meat producers in 2014.

In turns out they didn’t need to. Upon review, the USDA said that its organic regulations included a section that allows for state and federal emergency pest or disease treatments and that the mosquito response wouldn’t be considered a pesticide application.

“So basically that organic is still certified organic,” Way said. “That was really good news for our industry, because for the rates that they were using, the amounts would have been minuscule.”

Another fear, that the flooding breached diesel tanks used to store fuel on farms and may have contaminated the rice, also proved unfounded. Tests by the state chemist showed the rice was fine, Way said.

Even if tanks had been compromised, flood waters that averaged four feet would have dispersed the diesel to less than one part per billion, Way said.

“There’s data coming in now that that rice is not adulterated,” he said.

Source: http://www.expressnews.com/business/local/article/Texas-rice-farmers-cheer-as-USDA-says-12258563.php#photo-14299209