re: Why isn't Louisiana an agricultural powerhouse?

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Why isn't Louisiana [fill in the blank]?
1) Centuries of corruption at every level of government
2) Centuries of inefficiency and waste in government
3) A culture that embraces laziness and doing just enough to get by
4) Army Corps of Engineers
5) Demographics

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This should be stickied.

are we not one of the largest producers of sugar and rice in the country?
I recall we were usually #2 in both, behind Hawaii in sugar and Arkansas in rice.

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Sugar lobby way weaker than midwest corn lobby

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Um no

Sugar is the most powerful lobby in Washington as far as Ag goes especially when you compare the amount of acres of sugarcane/sugarbeets to corn or soybeans

Sugar pretty much gets what they want

Rice and Cotton lobby also punch above their weight class

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plenty of agri potential

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So tell us how we are not reaching our agricultural potential and what can we do to reach it?

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So tell us how we are not reaching our agricultural potential and what can we do to reach it?

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He can't, because he doesn't know what the frick he's talking about...

There's probably some ways that we could do better. Better grazing management could increase the amount of beef produced. Planting appropriate crops based on the land (i.e., not planting sugarcane on ground that is marginal for even rice).

But none of that is going to catapult us from 34th to the Top 10. We are restricted by our land and what it's capable of.

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our land can only support so much and Louisiana isn't that big of a state.

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It's actually quite remarkable that nearly 25% of our land area is devoted to agriculture. The state is 52,400 square miles in area, which is about 33.5 million acres. About 8 million of that is devoted to agriculture according to Ag Census data.

And I'm not even sure that the 8 million acres includes forestland.

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Sugar is the most powerful lobby in Washington as far as Ag goes especially when you compare the amount of acres of sugarcane/sugarbeets to corn or soybeans

Sugar pretty much gets what they want

Rice and Cotton lobby also punch above their weight class

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Yup. I was sitting in some meeting a few years ago put on by the cotton industry where they were talking about how hard they were lobbying in Washington trying to get cottonseed approved as an oilseed. They threw up some slide that showed how much money was being spent in DC and it was exponentially higher compared to corn and soy on a per acre basis, but was still dwarfed by the sugar lobby.