Situation/weather: We continue to experiment the same weather conditions than the last months (hot and dry with very few small rains). Due to low irregular rains, we had to face additional restrictions periods of water pumping (either whole or partial) from the river imposed by the authorities. Currently, the river is at an extreme low level as you can see.

However, thanks to our artificial lake of 480 ha we could mitigate the problem and continue to irrigate the latest fields sowed which are in the final irrigation stage. Some rice producers downstream had already to abandon part of their production due to dryness and lack of water to irrigate their fields. It’s going to be another challenging campaign for Paraguayan rice producers.

Some storms are forecasted for the 2^nd and 3^rd week of January where the related rains will help fields’ irrigation, but the forecasted rainfall will unfortunately not be enough for the river to recover. The latest 300 has sowed might be affected if the situation continues as the remaining water stored in the reservoir is not enough to cover all the needs (final irrigation stage for most of the surface sowed in stage 1 to 3 and the latest surfaced sowed).

Production: We are making some humidity tests to see if we can start with the harvest of the initial 1,250 has sowed. We have currently a humidity index of 27/28 for the plants and with 26, we will start the harvest.  8 harvesters are ready to start the process as soon as we reach the targeted level of humidity (2 harvesters are going to be added in the peak period). We will also need 3-4 days when harvesting will begin to stabilize the machines (speed rotation). Silos and dryers wait for the production (full maintenance has been performed).