After the rice is harvested

The combines have finished, but the work is just beginning

Anyone who drives the roads of Arkansas County throughout the year can follow the progress of the rice crop. It starts out as tiny green shoots, grows into something looking like a huge overgrown lawn and finally it develops the lush golden brown heads and is ready for harvest. The combines come in and cut it down, and the trucks haul it off.

But what happens to the rice after that? In this series, the DeWitt Era-Enterprise visits three of Arkansas County’s rice processors to pick up the story.

It’s 8 a.m. on a hot and sunny August day, and already rows of trucks are lined up Grandview Drive for about a quarter of a mile. It’s just another day during rice harvest at Producers’ DeWitt Dryer facility.

For 10 months out of the year, the dryer facility is a fairly quiet place. But for two months, it is the scene of constant activity 24 hours a day as farmers bring in their newly harvested rice. Dryer manager Brandon Staton explains the procedure as the trucks slowly make their way through the line.

The first stop is the sample house, Staton says. Workers collect information from the farmer, including the variety, moisture level and grade of the rice. This particular might settle.

“We’ve got to keep everything clean,” Staton said. “We clean all day long.”

Plant foreman Louis Clark provides the numbers. The dryer can handle about seven trucks an hour, for a total of 84 trucks in 12 hours. With each truck carrying 1,100 to 1,200 bushels of rice, that means about 103,000 to 105,000 bushels are coming into the facility during peak operations.

Trucks start dumping at 7 a.m., Staton said. On particularly busy days, a truck may have to wait until the next morning.

Once the rice has been unloaded, its first stop is the scalperator, which does an initial cleaning. This removes debris such as sticks, rocks or other unwanted items, but does not take off the rice hulls or bran. That isn’t done until the rice leaves the DeWitt Dryer or Producers’ Dixie Dryer south of DeWitt and goes to the mills.

The rice goes into one of several receiving bins after that; these bins feed the rice into one of two 7,000-bushel Shanzen dryers. Rice will usually have to pass through the dryer three to four times before it reaches the desired moisture level of about 12.5 percent. Rice that is not dried sufficiently will mold; rice that is dried too much will crack.

Once drying is complete, it is stored in one of the four 250,000-bushel storage tanks outside the facility. The rice is kept there until it’s time to move it to one of Producers’ two mills at either Stuttgart or Greenville, MS.