Tiny Pests Are Destroying American Rice Fields. It's Another Hit For Farmers

Feb 02, 2026

By Michael Marks

Whenever a pest gets into Timothy Gertson’s rice fields, he normally tries to take care of it as soon as possible.

But last year, when a horde of tiny invasive insects infested a few hundred of his acres west of Houston, he had no choice but to let them be.

“We don’t have money in the budget to kill this thing anyway, and we really don’t have anything that’s killing it,” Gertson said.

The pest, called the rice delphacid, decimated U.S. rice crops in 2025. Farmers and researchers have yet to find a way to control it, and the infestations are worsening at a time when U.S. rice growers are dealing with challenging economic conditions.

Gertson’s a fifth-generation rice farmer. He’s been farming himself since 2009. He lost a few hundred acres to the pest last year. Low prices for rice plus a high cost of necessities such as fertilizer and pesticides have made it nearly impossible to profit off the crop in 2026, he said.

“We have the worst economic conditions since I started farming,” Gertson said. “It’s not even a comparison.”

‘Every single field had a presence’

The rice delphacid is native to Central and South America. Researchers believe it was likely blown north by high winds, and established a resident population in the U.S. over time.

At just a quarter-inch long when full-grown, the insect is hard to see. Even farmers who diligently monitor their fields can miss the delphacid nymphs according to Lina Bernaola, an assistant professor and rice entomologist at Texas A&M University.

“You might be scouting in an area where you don’t see the pest, but then a week later, you will see that the pest was there and already having an impact on your crop,” she said.

Rice delphacids damage the rice plant by sucking out its sap. They also spread a virus called hoja blanca, which can lower a plant’s yield or kill it.

Texas farmers first noticed the pest in 2015, but it took years for it to cause any significant challenges. By 2020, there were isolated issues with the delphacid. But in 2025, Bernaola said that infestations exploded across the rice belt.

“Pretty much every single field [in Texas] had a presence of rice delphacid,” she said.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids