By Leeann Culbreath
Georgia Organics
About 50 peanut researchers, growers, economists and processors spoke about the new peanut line and the opportunities and challenges for growing organic peanuts in Georgia at a forum here Aug. 21.
The challenge
"There is a market for organic peanuts from the Southeast if we can just grow them," said Corley Holbrook, a peanut geneticist with the United States Department of Agriculture. "Growing organic peanuts in Southern states like Georgia has seemed almost impossible until recently.""Growing an organic peanut crop in Georgia is going to be a challenge for two reasons: weed control and disease control," said John Beasley, a peanut agronomist with the University of Georgia Extension Service.
Holbrook and other scientists with USDA and UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences in Tifton, Ga., have developed a new peanut line called C11-2-39 that shows promise for resisting disease and shading out weeds.
"I'm amazed at this new (peanut). It's able to survive and thrive after an attack of fungus. It also spreads out more readily to help shade out weeds," said Shirley Daughtry, who grew the experimental peanut on her farm near Savannah.
But weed pressure, she said, still remains a big production hurdle to overcome.
Carroll Johnson, a USDA weed specialist, presented several organically acceptable weed-fighting techniques now under experimentation, including nontoxic herbicides, propane flaming and planting into other crops.
But at this point "there's no way around hand weeding early in the season," he said. He recommended planting organic peanuts in fields with the least historic weed pressure.
Other new peanut lines developed in Georgia and Florida show potential. Several weed, disease and general production experiments are also under way. Researchers at the USDA National Peanut Research Laboratory in Dawson, Ga., are conducting economic research on organic peanuts.
The Opportunity
Demand for organic peanut products is rising, says Jimmy Wedel of Sunland, Inc., a farmer-owned cooperative in New Mexico that buys and markets organic peanuts."We've turned down orders for 5 million pounds (of processed organic peanuts) this year because supply wasn't there," Wedel said.
The U.S. organic industry as a whole has been growing 20 percent annually for the past decade, according to the Organic Trade Association, a business group that tracks organic trends in North America.
Georgia produces about 40 percent of the nation's peanuts but no commercially-grown organic peanuts. Most organic peanuts are grown in the Southwest.
"There are still plenty of challenges out there for growing organic peanuts in Georgia, but the market opportunity is too great to ignore," said Alice Rolls, executive director of Georgia Organics, a nonprofit group that promotes organic growing.
The forum was sponsored by Georgia Organics, UGA's Coastal Plain Experiment Station and Nitragin, Inc.
More information on organic production in Georgia is available at www.georgiaorganics.org.
Sources: Corley Holbrook (229) 386-3176 (holbrook@tifton.usda.gov), John Beasley (229) 386-3006 (jbeasley@uga.edu), Carroll Johson (229) 386-3172 (cjohnson@tifton.usda.gov), Shirley Daughtry (912) 728-3708, Jimmy Wedel (505) 356-6638 (www.sunlandinc.com)
