A smaller rice crop last year is leading to tighter supplies this year. The USDA says that rough rice stocks at the start of the marketing year on August 1st, 2022 were 32.773 hundredweight, a decline of 13% on the year following a 16% drop in production from 2020 to 2021.
Most of that is held off farm, 29.78 million hundredweight, waiting to either be exported or to be processed and used for domestic food and beverage production, with on farm stocks of 2.903 million hundredweight.
