Well, it’s peanut planting time. Peanut farmers are waiting for the area that has not received any rain to get a rain to get this peanut crop in the ground. What’s going to happen now? Waiting on USDA to give us an estimate on how many peanuts have been planted before any contracts are going to be sealed. The first estimate was that this U.S. would be down about 14.4% on peanut acres for next year.
That’s down to a billion 674,000 acres. At the start of this discussion earlier, cotton was bringing in about 67 cents a pound and has recently gone to 86 cents a pound. And this is undoubtedly taking acres away from peanuts over and above the projected by USDA.
And although the Southeast has received very beneficial rains for the past 10 days, there’s still some major deficits in the areas that have not received rain. The industry also feels like planting should will be more than that than the 14% estimated. We had estimates this week from 20 to 30 percent down on the acres of peanuts.
That’s going to determine the market in the future, how many acres and what will be the average yield per acre, which will depend on the weather between now and harvest time.
Audio Reporting by Tyron Spearman for Southeast AgNet.