Dr. Michael Deliberto is a professor of agricultural policy at Louisiana State University. goes over some of the ins and outs of the new USDA relief program.
“But those payments will not be issued in early November, so it’s unclear now how much those payments will actually make in terms of offsetting the rise in fuel costs. But similar to the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program, the Harvest Fuel Relief program will provide simple proportional support to producers, and they’re going to use a uniform formula to cover a portion of modeled losses during the 2026 crop. That’s going to be a national formula per-crop, based on reported planted acres that producers have on file with FSA. They’re going to look at USDA Economic Research Service cost of production to determine what those rates will be.”
Diesel costs in Louisiana have risen from $2.63 a gallon in January to a current price of $5.34 a gallon.
“Fuel increase is going to impact crops differently based on irrigation needs, management intensity, etc. Put that into the perspective of Louisiana crops. In our enterprise budgets that we publish through the LSU Ad Center, we itemize the diesel fuel that’s consumed for tractors, self-propelled equipment, and for combine harvesters, and how much diesel per acre a corn grower is going to use 17 gallons an acre. Cotton is going to use 23 gallons an acre. Rice; 45 gallons an acre because of the permanent flood situation, applying anywhere from 20 to 24 acre-inches in six applications a year. That’s why rice has such a high dependence on diesel because it’s an irrigated crop. For soybeans, it’s about 12 gallons of diesel per acre. For sugar cane, that number is 36 gallons.”
He said rice and sugarcane farmers use more diesel per acre, so the high price puts a big crimp in their budgets.
“Let’s assume that fuel prices were to stay at the $5.34 mark for next year. That means that the fuel expenditure for a corn farm would go from $47 to $92; for cotton farms, $63 to $122 an acre; for soybeans, $32 to $62 an acre; for rice, $124 an acre to $240 an acre; and for sugar cane, about $98 per total farm acre to $191. When you have a near doubling of the fuel price over the growing season, that’s going to impact crops uniformly across the board. But you can see rice and sugar cane producers are more adversely affected due to their reliance on that as a critical input.”