It’s a good year for goobers

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Peanuts are loaded into a trailer at DeMott Peanut Co., where operations can run for 12 hours or more in a day to deal with a harvest season for a year in which many growers had good yields.
Teresa Owens, left, and Lance Johnson, chief grader at DeMott Peanut Co., examine a sample of for impervections that can affect their price.

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October 4, 2012

It’s a good year for goobers

Some growers reporting 6,000 pounds/acre

Alan Mauldin The Moultrie Observer The Moultrie Observer Thu Oct 04, 2012, 09:31 PM EDT

MOULTRIE — Peanut production in the county is up this year, with a more normal amount of rainfall boosting the pounds of goobers gathered on acreage that are not under irrigation.

With much of the crop harvested, Colquitt County Extension agent Glenn Beard estimated the average amount of peanuts at about 4,500 pounds per acre.

That amount is an increase over 2010, when production averaged 3,900 pounds per acre, according to figures compiled by the University of Georgia’s Center for Agribusiness & Economic Development.

“It’s not unheard of at this state of the year, last week when they were harvesting, to get 5,000, 6,000

pounds,” Beard said. “I’m hearing a lot of 5,000- and 6,000-pound yields. It’s dryland, irrigated, both. It’s looking real good this year.”

In addition to more help coming out of the clouds this year for much of the county, technology also helped peanut growers.

“These new peanut varieties we have now, they need water, but if you get it at the right time it’s not a large amount they need,” Beard said.

“It doesn’t take much; it just takes it at the right time.”

Growers here planted less peanuts this year than in 2011, primarily because cotton prices were strong at the time farmers were making decisions on how to allot acreage, he said.

He estimated they planted about 10,000 to 12,000 acres.

“It’s looking really good yield-wise,” Beard said. “It’s not going to break any records, but it’s going to be really good.

The outlook for cotton also looks good, he said.

In 2010, the last year for which the University of Georgia prepared a report, farmers in Colquitt County planted 16,299 acres of peanuts.

At an average sale price of 23 cents per pound, the farm gate value of the crop was $14.3 million.

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