Landry Cuts the Red Tape While Washington's Fuel Policy Squeezes the Farm

Diesel hit $6.02 a gallon across Louisiana on Wednesday, just a penny off the all-time record of $6.03 set two days earlier. A year ago the same gallon cost $3.30. That is the backdrop against which Gov. Jeff Landry signed an executive order Wednesday declaring a statewide fuel emergency, and for once the response in Baton Rouge matched the urgency of the problem.

The order, in effect through Oct. 22, suspends state restrictions and penalties on using dyed off-road diesel in certain licensed highway vehicles, specifically Class 2 forest products trucks like log haulers and Class 5 farm vehicles such as grain trucks and livestock trailers. Under ordinary law, running dyed diesel through a highway vehicle carries a penalty of $10 per gallon or $1,000, whichever is greater. Landry's order also activates the state's price-gouging statutes for the duration of the emergency.

"We're not going to sit on the sidelines while Louisiana farmers are paying record prices to harvest the crops that feed our families and support our economy," Landry said. "We have an opportunity to provide immediate relief, and that's exactly what we're doing."

Credit where it's due: that is a governor moving at the speed farmers actually need. But the order has a hard limit built into it. Louisiana can waive its own penalties. It cannot waive the IRS's. The order directs the state Department of Revenue secretary to formally request dyed-diesel penalty relief from the federal government within three business days, which means the real fix still sits on a desk in Washington.

The timing could not be worse for the men and women bringing in this year's crop. LSU AgCenter built its 2026 crop enterprise budgets around an assumed diesel price of $2.85 a gallon, less than half of what farmers are actually paying at the pump right now. An AgCenter video report released Tuesday found fuel costs up 60% since March, even as crop prices have climbed nearly 20% since January. LSU AgCenter economist Michael Deliberto put it plainly: "Higher commodity prices are good," he said, "but it doesn't go enough to alleviate where these input costs have gone."

This harvest is not small potatoes. USDA estimates put Louisiana's 2026 harvest at 1.02 million acres of soybeans, 540,000 acres of sugarcane and 394,000 acres of rice, nearly 2 million acres in all. LSU AgCenter valued the state's total agricultural economy at nearly $12.96 billion in 2025, with forestry alone worth $3.48 billion, sugarcane $1.51 billion, rice $618.53 million and soybeans $518.04 million. When diesel doubles, Louisiana farmers feel it in real dollars at harvest time. It is the margin between a working farm and a foreclosure notice.

Louisiana Farm Bureau President Richard Fontenot said the order buys producers the room they need to finish the job. "This allows us, as producers, to finish taking our crop in, and our timber industry to finish bringing those crops in with these escalating fuel prices," he said. Agriculture and Forestry Commissioner Dr. Mike Strain was blunter about the math farmers are staring at. "Even with high-yield corn at 200+ bushels per acre, they're going to break even on maybe make a few dollars," Strain said, "but this hard, because this is right at harvest."

Meanwhile, the national numbers tell you exactly why the pump price is where it is. U.S. distillate exports hit 1.94 million barrels per day for the week ending Aug. 7, the highest weekly figure the Energy Information Administration has recorded since it started tracking in 2010, and exports stayed above 1.7 million barrels per day for weeks afterward. By Sept. 11, domestic distillate inventories stood at just 107.9 million barrels, 29.9 days of supply, both the lowest the EIA has ever logged for that week of the year.

Read those two facts side by side. American refiners are shipping record volumes of diesel overseas while domestic stockpiles sit at historic lows during the exact weeks Louisiana farmers need every gallon they can get. Landry didn't create this problem, and an executive order won't solve it. The cause is a federal energy and trade posture that treats distillate fuel as an export commodity first and a domestic necessity second, and it lands hardest on the people running combines through rice fields in Jeff Davis Parish and log trucks through Vernon Parish.

Landry did what a governor can do, and did it fast. The next move belongs to the IRS, which has three business days from Wednesday to say whether it will match the state's relief or let federal penalties keep hanging over every grain truck running dyed fuel down a Louisiana highway between now and Oct. 22.