UGA peanut agronomist gives update on this year’s crop season

ALBANY, Ga. (WALB) - On Thursday, WALB’s Jim Wallace caught up with the University of Georgia’s State Extension Peanut Agronomist, Scott Monfort for an update on this year’s crop season.

“We’re about halfway through the peanut season right now. How does it stand for the farmers?” asked Wallace.

“For the most part, the crop still looks very good. As you know, we are coming off one of the weeks of hottest weather in June we have ever seen, seems like. At least in my short career. It’s one of the hottest ones I have ever seen. And it’s one of the driest ones too for a lot of those areas, throughout the state. Right now, we’ve been receiving rain. Like I said the crop is perking back up and looks okay but we got a long road ahead of us. We still need a lot more rain throughout the state in order to push this crop forward and to continue on the right road to make a good crop,” Monfort said.

“With the war in Europe right now, will the demand for Georgia peanuts be stronger or about the same?”

“We’re seeing in the marketplace, we’re still exporting a tremendous amount of peanuts or at least on the same level that we have done over the last couple of years. To a lot of different countries now, there is no doubt that this war has caused some problems with exporting peanuts or just the export market overall. As you can tell it has impacted other crops and caused prices, commodity prices of other crops to go up. That has also caused our acres to go down a little bit. Because people planted more of those other crops. Now I think overall our demand for our product, whether that’s peanuts in the shell or whether that’s peanut oil, whether that’s peanut butter product or any candies. I think we are still doing ok with our usage so far. Maybe down some, but not tremendous,” said Monfort.

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