HORIZON AG NEWS

Notes from Rice County

Planting is starting to pick up in areas of the Coastal Region after a slow start in South Louisiana and Texas due to wet weather.

Horizon Ag’s team of District Field Representatives is here if you need us, for support during planting or at any point in the season.

The photo above are variety strips being planted on Christian Richard’s farm in Kaplan, Louisiana. His farm will be the site of the 2025 Horizon Ag Louisiana Field Day on June 23. More details will be provided at a time closer to the event.

An official Day to Celebrate Agriculture!

We were proud to celebrate National Agriculture Day earlier this week and to share this year’s theme “Together We Grow” with our friends and family in and outside of agriculture.

The National Ag Day program encourages every American to:

Understand how food, fiber, and fuel products are produced.
Appreciate the role agriculture plays in providing safe, abundant, and affordable products.
Value the essential role of agriculture in maintaining a strong economy.
Acknowledge and consider career opportunities in the agriculture, food and fiber industry.

It was an honor to stand with farmers and other industry leaders to raise awareness of the importance of agriculture and the U.S. rice industry, on National Ag Day 2025.

Arkansas Best Management Webinar

Horizon Ag recently participated in webinars in Arkansas and Louisiana, along with our university partners in both states and BASF. Both webinars focused on recommended Best Management Practices for Clearfield® and Provisia® rice and can be viewed on our varieties page.

WEBINAR HIGHLIGHTS

Dr. Bob Scott, Arkansas weed scientist:

In a recent rice weed management study at the Northeast Rice Research and Extension Center in Harrisburg, Ark., Dr. Scott compared Provisia herbicide in Provisia rice with Highcard™ herbicide in Max-Ace™ rice. “Both products are quizalofop, but Highcard herbicide contains a safener. A safener can be kind of tricky because you safen it to prevent rice injury but, if you're not careful, for certain weeds too. In this case, we saw lower control of barnyard grass, and a little bit also on the weedy rice with Highcard. With bigger weeds, we did see an advantage in this trial for the Provisia system.”

“In terms of weedy rice, one of the things that has me concerned is that for the last couple of years we had gotten 21 and 22 positive samples but, in 2024, we had 97 samples test positive for weedy rice. That was a significant increase and shows the threat for further development of resistance in our important rice technologies.”

“Way down the pipeline, there are some new herbicide technologies being evaluated, but they are a long way off, For the time being, we need to continue to protect Provisia and that herbicide tolerant group to get us to the next technology.”

PVL05 being harvested in Puerto Rico.

Dr. Tim Walker, Horizon Ag CEO:

Agronomically, we're at a point with our varieties where we can take a more serious look at introducing the Provisia technology into more rice fields, especially in fields where the Clearfield system still works. This is a great time to switch to a new technology and begin working on hard to control weedy rice and grasses.

The Provisia System, with PVL03 and PVL04, performs at a much higher level than the early launches of the system. PVL04 did extremely well in the Upper Delta, throughout Arkansas and into the bootheel of Missouri in 2024. PVL03 has been the top planted variety in Louisiana the past two seasons and will be planted on a lot of acres in the South again this year.

In addition, we just completed harvesting in Puerto Rico what will be one of our latest Provisia varieties – PVL05. We are excited about our pipeline and expect that new PVL05 from the LSU AgCenter breeding program and PVL06 from the University of Arkansas breeding program will have soft launches in 2026.

Updated Decision Tool

The recently-updated Horizon Ag Productivity app is a handy management tool. It’s loaded with detailed information, from variety characteristics and suggested seeding and fertilizer rates to calculators for projecting ROI and milling yield premiums.

The Horizon Ag Productivity App also has a new feature for 2025 that enables Horizon Ag to text alerts and the latest information on in-season developments to help you make the best decisions to protect yield potential and your bottom line.

The Horizon Ag Productivity App is available to download in the App Store or Google Play.

Let's Be Social

Check out the Horizon Ag Facebook and Instagram pages for industry news, product updates and good conversations about rice and the industry. We’d like you to join our “community” as we share the latest from rice country.