Texas growers of organic rice used for health food favorites like vegan burritos and tofu-vegetable bowls are breathing a sigh of relief now that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has decided the crop has not been compromised by mosquito spraying in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.

While Texas ranks sixth for the nation's overall rice production, it supplies nearly a third of the nation's organic rice. Farmers willing to go through the red tape of getting organic certification find it can bring in about twice as much money as conventional rice. Of the state’s approximately 160,000 acres of rice fields, between 18,000 and 20,000 acres are certified organic. Texas produced $13.7 million of organic rice last year, making it second only to California.

But this year’s organic status was at risk due to the mass aerial spraying to control mosquitoes hatching eggs in all the standing post-Harvey flood waters in Southeast Texas.

Harvey dumped an estimated 34 trillion gallons of rain over southeastern Texas and southwestern Louisiana — about enough to fill Lake Tahoe, a 192-square-mile lake with an average depth of about 1,000 feet. To keep mosquitoes from proliferating into a serious nuisance with the threat of spreading diseases like encephalitis and the Zika and West Nile viruses, the state Department of Health and Human Services and Federal Emergency Management Agency last month enlisted the U.S. Air Force to use massive C-130 aircraft to spray pesticides over hundreds of thousands of acres.

Harvey was devastating to growers in a swath of Texas state stretching north of the Coastal Bend up to the Louisiana coast. While agricultural damages are still being tallied, the storm’s record flooding and wind drowned out about 100,000 acres of rice, stranded 2,500 head of livestock in emergency shelters and took out a cotton gin as well as thousands of acres of the fiber and seed that make for Texas’ top crop. Before Harvey hit, cotton farmers were harvesting a record crop and rice farmers were looking at some of the best yields they’d ever had.

Turn to Sunday’s Business Section or click here on ExpressNews.com to read the full story.

lbrezosky@express-news.net