By Clint Thompson
Georgia peanut acreage is around 940,000 acres this year, a substantial increase from last year’s 850,000 and the 685,000 in 2022. Growers are trying to survive from one year to the next, says Scott Monfort, University of Georgia Extension peanut agronomist. He discussed the crop at the recent Southern Peanut Growers Conference in Panama City Beach, Florida.
“It is (about survival) and I can’t blame them. We’re trying to make a crop to pay some back, trying to make sure we don’t lose everything. Unfortunately, we’ve got some people that are financially on the bubble,” Monfort said.
“They’ve got to do what they’ve got to do. We’ve got some people that stayed right there where they needed to be rotation-wise. But a large percentage of this amount of acres is starting to be crunched into a short window on rotation. What we have to do as a group is try to minimize the effects of it.”
Cotton Impact
What Georgia’s peanut producers need is for cotton prices to improve to make it a viable option to grow more of next year. Cotton prices are 65 cents per pound, far below the cost of production and well below the 96 cents mark recorded on Feb. 26, 2024.
“Cotton and corn are the two that we’re married up to. We need that to sustain us, come back up in price and make it work,” Monfort said.
“It’s easy for us to say, ‘Do you want another crop to fill the void?’ Let’s throw a vegetable crop in there and that will save the world. The problem is, we’re talking a lot of acres that need to be rotated out, and we don’t have the manpower to do vegetables, nor do a lot of these guys that are struggling right now have the financial means to stretch out even more.
“Vegetables are expensive to grow. It’s risk or reward with that. The infrastructure is not there and if you don’t have the infrastructure, you can’t jump into that.”