Well, the peanut farmers keep watching the Peanut Stocks and Processing Report from USDA and it shows they have too many peanuts.
Matter of fact, the commercial storage right now is up 36.4% compared to the same time last year. Also, the shell peanut items that are stored in warehouses is also up 20.4% compared to last March. That’s pushing the price of peanuts down because of the oversupply.
In March, shellers milled 518 million pounds, that’s 10.4% more as they try to clean them up and then commercial processors utilized 208 million pounds and that is 4% more. So the market is increasing a little bit with these extra peanuts. They’re showing peanut candy down 2%, peanuts in snacks up 7.5%, peanut butter down 1.8%. Overall, the consumption of edible peanuts is down 0.8% of 1%.
In-shells are down 11%. But overall, they are going along pretty good. They need to have an energy boost right now to get the peanut market back up to where these extra peanuts can be used as they are planting the new crop this week and next week.
Audio Reporting by Tyron Spearman for Southeast AgNet.