By Clint Thompson
This week’s Georgia Peanut Tour is providing the Georgia Peanut Commission and University of Georgia (UGA) Peanut Team another opportunity to educate about peanuts while promoting Georgia’s crop.
The tour, which is based out of Americus, Georgia, began on Tuesday with a Hot Topics seminar and will conclude on Thursday with stops throughout Southwest Georgia. It has allowed attendees to learn more about the various facets of the peanut production process, specifically digging, harvesting and at buying points, as well as learning about UGA research at the Southwest Georgia Research and Education Center in Plains, Georgia, on Wednesday.
Tour’s Value
Scott Monfort, University of Georgia Extension peanut agronomist, has participated in the tour multiple times and understands its value.
“It’s very beneficial because we have 220 people on this peanut tour, and a lot of them haven’t been around peanuts before. They’re from different countries and also different states,” Monfort said. “This tour was built on the fact that we bring people in that are involved in the movement of peanuts through the process; from the buying points to the manufacturers to the banks to the grocery stores.
“The people that might see the end result in a can or eat it, they’re the ones that go out and say, ‘I need to buy 25 tons of this.’ But they’ve never dealt with why the price is the way it is or they may have that question, ‘Why is the quality not as good this year as it was last year?’ Doing this, they get a chance to see the many different things they have to go through to make the crop or harvest the crop.”
Cristiane Pilon, chair of this year’s Peanut Tour and associate professor at UGA, talked about this year’s tour.
“We’re seeing digging and harvesting, processing, research that we have going on. It’s a very important part of the process,” Pilon said. “We learned about seed quality when we visited the Georgia Seed Development.
“It’s a very good opportunity to host people from other countries; just show what we have going on here and how we grow our peanuts and the type of production we have.”