Daniel Berglund, a rice farmer for almost 40 years, climbs into his green-and-yellow 2014 John Deere model 8335R tractor in early May, turns on the ignition, and begins his day. As the tractor—which he bought used to save money—rumbles to life, the computer screen to the right of the large black steering wheel lights up, revealing a map of the 100 acres he leases in Wharton County, a sleepy place southwest of Houston’s sprawl. On the map are GPS-generated contour lines indicating where he should create this year’s dirt levees.
He shifts the four-wheel-drive tractor into gear and methodically drives it across the field, which is covered in 4-inch-tall bright-green blades of basmati rice he planted two weeks earlier. Periodically, Berglund glances at the digital display that shows his tractor’s path in real time to confirm he’s following the prescribed lines to create levees with a 2.4-inch drop between them.
On Berglund’s first pass, the tractor tires’ treads create deep ruts in the dirt. For his second pass, he lowers the plow, which piles dirt into a line behind it. By repeating the process, Berglund adds more dirt to the levees until they reach the correct height.
His efforts have one essential goal: to contain water in each paddy—the land between the raised dirt levees—up to a depth of between 3 and 4 inches and no more. With less water, rice won’t thrive; with more, an increasingly scarce and expensive resource will be wasted.
By day’s end, Berglund finishes constructing the levees. It’s one of his last fields to prepare for flooding, and he’s happy to get the job done. In a few days, he’ll apply herbicide and fertilizer, then open gates to flood the paddies with water that will stay on the crop until harvest time in August.
Half of the land that Berglund farms is in Wharton County; the other half is farther south in Matagorda County. Wharton, Matagorda, and Colorado counties comprise the Texas Rice Belt, where 60 percent of all the state’s rice is grown. Berglund irrigates his Wharton County rice fields with well water, but he relies on water purchased from the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA), the quasi-governmental agency that regulates water from the Highland Lakes, for his Matagorda County fields.
But that Matagorda land now sits idle because the LCRA has not opened the gates to the canal system that channels water from the Colorado River to his rice paddies for two years in a row.
Without this LCRA water, Berglund and dozens of other Texas rice farmers are stymied. Indeed, their industry’s survival is at risk, given uncertain water supply and other pressures created by a warming climate, erratic weather, rising costs, and the ever-variable price of rice in a competitive global economy.
For nine decades, rice farmers who bought water from the LCRA could open valves and flood their rice fields when needed. Even during the historic drought of the 1950s, farmers irrigated their fields from the Highland Lakes, the chain of dammed freshwater bodies spanning Central Texas from Lake Buchanan to Lake Austin.
Today, 280 Texas farmers raise rice on about 149,000 acres, down from 1,400 who cultivated about 650,000 acres from the 1950s through the 1970s. In subsequent decades, urban and suburban growth exploded, swallowing up rice farms in towns around Houston, like Katy and Pearland, and stressing farmers in more rural parts of the Rice Belt who depend on reservoirs that supply water to fast-growing Austin.
What had once been unimaginable—that the LCRA would not deliver the water needed to grow rice—first occurred in March 2012, when the water stored in the Highland Lakes’ two reservoirs, Buchanan and Lake Travis, sunk to less than 850,000 acre-feet (about 42 percent of capacity), triggering the LCRA’s emergency drought plan and cutting off water to farmers downstream.
According to the Texas Water Development Board, the state agency tasked with planning for a secure water future, the 80-week drought of 1950-1957 was the longest in state history, but the 50-week drought of 2010-2015 was, in some ways, worse. The year 2011 set the record for the hottest and driest 12-month period and affected the Colorado River so dramatically that the LCRA, in its 2020 Water Management Plan, designated it the worst in the river’s recorded history.
That crisis spawned headlines, but Texas rice farmers’ continuing struggles have drawn less attention. It was not until after torrential rains replenished the lakes in 2015 that the LCRA finally allowed rice farmers to reopen valves and release water onto their fields in March 2016.
“The whole economy is coming down on us.”
But, in July 2023, the LCRA again denied water to the rice farmers because of extreme drought in the Colorado’s watershed. By then, Texas rice farmers were beginning to harvest their main crop and preparing for their second crop, harvested in October and known as “ratoon,” derived from the Spanish retoño, meaning a shoot or sprout. This secondary rice crop costs far less to grow, and its yields produce much, if not all, of the farmer’s profit. Without water, the 2023 ratoon crop died, and farmers lost money.
Then, in March 2024, the LCRA notified farmers that they would be cut off again. The soonest they might be permitted to buy stored water is March 2025, depending on the reservoirs’ water levels. The situation has gotten so grave that the entire rice farming industry in Texas is at risk.
Water—its high cost and low availability—is one of a host of challenges facing Texas rice farmers including escalating costs, urbanization, encroaching solar and wind farms, and erratic weather conditions. Last year, the rice industry added about $550 million to the state economy, down from 1954’s $850 million (in today’s dollars), said Lloyd Ted Wilson, an expert on rice at Texas A&M University.
The decline in rice farming affects related businesses too: rice drying, milling, and marketing companies; aviation companies that spray farmers’ fields with pesticides and fertilizers; and trucking, farm equipment, and fuel companies that provide supplies, services, and equipment. These businesses may feel the pinch even more than farmers since they’re ineligible for federal agricultural subsidies.
Rice Belt Warehouse, headquartered in El Campo in Wharton County, has six different rice-drying facilities across the region. Their combined annual capacity is about 400 million pounds of rice, but last year, farmers brought in only 230 million pounds. “It’s like, man, how many years can we keep doing this?” said CEO Heath Bush, who steered the company through the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic and is coping with the current drought. “I hate to see it go. We need more acres [in rice], and we need our farmers to be successful. … The whole economy is coming down on us.”
Meanwhile, another rice drier, Brookshire Drying Company, located eight miles west of Katy, has been losing customers as farmers lose their land to Houston’s sprawl.
Three hundred farmers once grew rice on 75,000 acres near Katy, and as many as 45 rice driers operated in the area in the late 1970s, said Joshua Garland, the museum coordinator for the City of Katy.
In 2017, the last time the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported rice acreage by county, only about 15,000 acres were planted in the Katy area.
Brookshire Drying, founded in 1948, is the only remaining facility that dries and stores rice near Katy. “We’re the last of the Mohicans,” said Business Manager Pam West, who offices in a one-story building near the firm’s tall round concrete rice driers.
But the company is struggling to stay in business. To augment its now-reduced drying and storing income, it is shipping unmilled rice directly to Mexico. (When the Texas Observer spoke to West in May, she’d recently returned from a trip to Mexico City.) Additionally, it is building a new “state-of-the-art” rice mill. When complete, the company will market the rice it produces under the brand name Honestly Texas to grocery stores statewide. “We’re going to shut down if we don’t [build the mill],” West said. “It’s just keeping the company viable.”
Rice is not the only agricultural crop in trouble in the Lone Star State. South Texas farmers dependent on water from the Rio Grande have been facing increasing salinity in water as reservoir levels drop, with vegetable yields down 40 percent in some places. Sugarcane farming in the region has become effectively nonviable, and crops including cotton and citrus are at risk.
Rice farming in Texas dates back more than a century, and state water policies have always been an issue. In 1915, a group of rice farmers made what was then a two-day trip from the rice farming counties of the Lower Colorado River Basin to Austin to join forces with the city’s Chamber of Commerce to convince federal officials to build dams on the Colorado River to control floods and ensure a steady water supply. By the end of their meetup, the four dozen attendees had formed the Colorado River Improvement Association, the predecessor of the LCRA.
Buchanan Dam, which created Lake Buchanan, was completed in 1938, and Mansfield Dam, which made Lake Travis, was completed in 1942. These two reservoirs provide water to people in the Austin region, along with rice farmers and industrial users, while contributing environmental flows to maintain the health of Matagorda Bay downstream.
But in contrast to the unity farmers and businessmen originally enjoyed, exploding population growth in the modern era has increasingly pitted rice farmers against city dwellers in the fight over water rights.
The LCRA splits its buyers into two categories: those whose water supply is “firm” and those whose is “interruptible.” In exchange for cheaper rates, interruptible water can be shut off if reservoir water levels decline below certain levels, which are updated every five years. Rice farmers’ water is interruptible; water sold to city dwellers and industrial users like power plants is firm. Only after firm water users’ allocations are fulfilled may rice farmers buy water.
With more users, less water is available for rice farmers. The population of the Austin area nearly doubled from 1.2 million in 2000 to 2.3 million in 2020 and has been projected to reach 4.5 million by 2050.
When the LCRA first terminated water allocations to rice farmers in 2012, they scrambled to salvage their livelihoods.
Some who owned their land drilled wells if they could afford it—a big “if” given the price tag of a new well, which can run between $300,000 and $700,000. But farmers in parts of Matagorda County, which borders the Gulf of Mexico, cannot use well water since the land sits over groundwater that is too salty for rice plants. Many others don’t own the land they farm.
Without water or the ability to dig a well, farmers rely on “prevented planting” provisions in their federal crop insurance policies, which provide compensation when crops can’t be planted because of an emergency like drought. But the payments provide only part of the lost income, with a maximum payout of about 60 percent of the insured crop’s value. After the LCRA cut off water access again in July 2023, Texas farmers placed almost half of all rice land, more than 71,000 acres, in the federal prevented planting program.
Berglund, the farmer in Wharton and Matagorda counties, has been forced to “idle” his Matagorda acreage. “As long as the issue is lack of rainfall in the watershed, we have the ability to utilize [prevented planting] as a way to cover our fixed costs and, hopefully, some of our labor, so we don’t need to be laying people off,” Berglund said. “That’s the only thing that’s keeping us viable down there.”
Nationwide, drought has become the number-one reason for crop insurance payouts for farmers unable to plant. According to the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, those payments shot up from about $1 billion in 2001 to $7.6 billion in 2021. How long payouts can continue remains to be seen.
Climate change has piled on other risks besides drought for rice farmers. Hurricane Beryl, the earliest Category 5 Atlantic hurricane ever reported, made landfall on July 8 in Matagorda County as a Category 1. “[It] damaged the crop, and the wet conditions have made harvest difficult,” said Lowell “LG” Raun, a third-generation rice farmer who cultivates about 1,000 acres in Wharton County. “In my 50 years of farming, I have never had a hurricane make landfall nearby prior to harvest.”
Another safety net rice farmers use in tough times is Price Loss Coverage, a USDA program that subsidizes farmers when the market value of rice falls below the so-called “effective reference price,” currently set by the 2018 federal Farm Bill at $14 per 100 pounds of rice. That price lags far below rice farmers’ cost of production, which has increased 35 percent since then, Raun said. He is among the Texans who have been pushing members of Congress to update the Farm Bill.
On the wooden walls of Raun’s office in his El Campo home, once his uncles’ childhood bedroom, are paintings of Asian rice farming that he and his wife, Linda, have collected in their travels. A sepia-toned photo of his two uncles and his father—Russell, Norris, and Lowell Raun—sits on the mantle of his fireplace. Together, they farmed rice during the zenith of Texas rice farming.
Raun recently returned from Washington, D.C., where he advocated for rice farmers in meetings with U.S. House agriculture committee members working on the new Farm Bill. “There’s going to be a lot of rice farmers that are not going to make it if we don’t get a new Farm Bill with a relevant reference price,” he said.
“It’s about the love of the job.”
Some have already given up. There are 25 percent fewer rice farmers in Texas now than before the 2010-2015 drought, according to the USDA. Some farmers converted paddies to rows for crops like sorghum, cotton, or corn. Others sold their land or lost their leased land to green energy companies catalyzed by the federal government’s incentive programs.
Wind, solar, and hydrogen energy companies have all been building facilities in the Texas Rice Belt because of its plentiful wind and sun, pro-business atmosphere, and proximity to both electric transmission lines and Houston, the nation’s energy capital. Other farmers who grow row crops can work around wind turbines, but dodging windmills can be dangerous for the pilots of the planes that rice farmers rely on to apply fertilizer and pesticides on flooded fields.
Solar panels and crops require the same things—land and sunlight—so they can’t always share the same property. Some rice farmers like Paul Sliva argue that more value should be placed on agriculture and preserving the domestic food supply. About 65 percent of rice produced in the United States is consumed domestically; the rest is exported. (In 2023, Japan, Mexico, Haiti, and Canada were the largest importers of American rice, according to the USDA.)
“I think there ought to be a law that every frickin’ building—every rooftop—should have solar panels before you start taking away good farmland,” said Sliva, who grows both row crops and rice in Matagorda County.
For some Texas farmers, converting thirsty rice fields to solar or wind farms—which also help combat the climate crisis—makes too much sense to resist. Increasingly, solar-related income is more reliable than crop sales. Solar leases can last decades and provide landowners $1,000 an acre annually.
The historic 32,000-acre Pierce Ranch in Wharton County leased 2,800 acres to AP Solar for its Red-Tailed Hawk Solar Project, said Laurance Armour, a fifth-generation rice farmer and the ranch’s general manager. When the project came online in May, a 25-turbine wind farm was already operating on the ranch. Armour may soon add battery storage and carbon sequestration to the mix. “It’s much more lucrative to be doing renewable energy these days than farming, frankly,” Armour said. “And so that’s why we’ve chosen to do what we did.”
skyrocketing production costs are another reason rice farmers struggle to profit. The average price many farmers pay for water has nearly tripled over the last decade, according to data supplied by an LCRA spokesperson.
To grow both the main and ratoon crops of rice in Texas, a farmer needs about 5 acre-feet of water per acre, Sliva said. “When water becomes your most expensive per-acre charge, it is kind of out of whack with everything. That’s what is causing the industry, at least in Matagorda County, to decline and then probably disappear in three or four years.”
In 2022, only 10,500 acres of rice were grown in Matagorda County, down from a peak of 55,000 acres in 1979.
Stewart Savage, whose family began farming rice in the 1890s in Matagorda County, got out of rice farming in 2021 and does not regret it. “My brother and I made the decision that we didn’t want to go into a big line of debt diversifying into row crops because we weren’t row crop farmers; we were rice farmers,” he said. They sold the land they owned to a row crop farmer and did not renew leases on the rest.
There is a glimmer of hope for rice farmers as the LCRA wraps up construction on the new $456 million Arbuckle Reservoir near Lane City in Wharton County.
With no reservoirs downriver of Austin, the LCRA has previously been unable to store Colorado River water below the Highland Lakes. For example, in 2013, during the worst part of the last big drought, Austin’s Onion Creek flooded, cresting at a record high of 41 feet, but none of that water could be captured because the rain fell downstream of the southernmost dam on the Colorado River.
The new Arbuckle Reservoir will be capable of storing 40,000 acre-feet of water and add more than twice that amount to the region’s water supply. The testing phase that began this summer will be followed by “fill and refill” testing, the final step before the reservoir becomes operational, said John Hofmann, the LCRA’s executive vice president of water.
But even with that reservoir, Hofmann predicts more troubles ahead for Texas farmers. “Inevitably, the interruptible water available to rice farmers will decrease given the pace of population growth in Central Texas. Progressively, there’s less water available for them as firm demands grow over time.”
The LCRA plans to update its Water Plan in 2025, and rice farmers like Berglund, Raun, and Sliva plan to be involved. In the meantime, farmers want help to improve the canal system to conserve water lost to evaporation, especially as Texas summers get longer and hotter. Berglund would like to see the LCRA install solar panels over its canals to reduce evaporation while generating power, a concept already being tested elswhere, including California, where Governor Gavin Newsom is investing $20 million of federal funds into a pilot program expected to generate green energy and reduce water loss.
Although the LCRA spends money to reduce water loss from its primary canal system, it does not fund water-saving measures on the smaller canals located on private land that connect LCRA canals to farmers’ fields. To help pay for these, farmers can apply for federal funding from the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation System.
Such measures reduce water loss, help farmers better utilize rainfall, and reduce fertilizer runoff. “You can save a lot of water, but it comes at a cost,” Berglund said. He fears that with increased water cut-offs, the feds may reject improvements for rice farmers as a bad investment. Ideally, he wants to see the LCRA collaborate with farmers and the federal government to improve water delivery systems.
But farmers like Berglund, who have continued to farm despite the challenges, are not optimistic for themselves or their children.
One of Berglund’s four children, Dillon, became a farmer and shares equipment and know-how with his father. However, he’s losing a large chunk of farmland because the landowner chose to rent it to a solar farm instead of renewing his lease. “My son’s got a farm that he’s supposed to be out of by September. He has 150 mama cows and 400 acres of rice on it,” Bergland said, his distress palpable.
Nearing retirement age, Berglund still has no plans to quit farming rice. “It’s about the love of the job, so you try and do everything you can to make it work. But the margins are so thin,” he said. “It’s angst. It raises your blood pressure and makes you worry at night about your future. What am I going to do differently? What can I do?”
Editor’s Note: The description in this story of the interaction between solar panels and crops has been updated.
