The 2025 planting progress for rice in California was a bit unusual compared to other years. I am looking at the USDA figures and while they are not perfect, I think they give a pretty good general indication of planting. Some things to note for the graph shown in Figure 1.
- Due to a warm dry spring, 2025 started off fast with 20% of the acreage planted by April 27 and 35 % by May 4. These values are much higher than for an average year.
- There was a lull in planting in early to mid-May which is unusual. This was likely due to a lot of wind and the forecast of rain (although in most cases rainfall amounts were small).
- From mid to end of May, planting continued at a steady pace with 95% of rice planted by June 1. USDA does not report planting progress after June 1; however, driving around in early June, I still saw a number of fields still being planted.
- In 2025, the time to 50% planting was slightly delayed relative to average (May 15 instead of May 13).
- In 2025, the majority of rice acreage (20 to 80%) was planted over a span of 4 weeks.
In most years that period requires only 3 weeks. The was largely due to the slower rate of planting in early/mid-May.
What does this mean? First, it should have made it easier to plan and get water, fertilizer and pesticides on in a timelier manner as the demand for those resources at any given time was less. Second, all else being equal (i.e. variety selection), it is going to spread out the harvest season. More rice will be coming in early and towards the end. Third, with a lot of late planted rice, a wet fall could cause harvest problems.
Figure 1. Planting progress for California from 1994 to 2025 (USDA). 2025 is shown in orange. The blue doted line represents an average of all the blue dots which are weekly planting progress data from 1994 to 2024 (31 years).