Peanut farmers have no efficient, scientific way to know
beforehand how certain issues will affect them and the industry
they supply. But a University of Georgia project may soon change
that.

“Very little information is available about peanuts’ cost of
production or the total peanut operation,” said Stanley Fletcher,
coordinator of the National Center for Peanut Competitiveness and
economist with the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental
Sciences.

Producers of other major U.S. crops, such as corn, wheat,
soybeans, cotton and rice, already have this type of information,
he said. Dairy and swine operators have it, too. Peanut farmers
need it.

Peanut Transition

The industry is in a transition stage now, Fletcher said. In the
past, the U.S. government regulated, through a price-support
system, how peanuts were sold.

But that’s changing.

And farmers need to know how these changes will affect their
bottom lines.

It would be nice to know, for example, exactly how a decision in
Washington or a new growing technique might affect each peanut
farm in the Southeast. But that would be impractical, if not
impossible.

Representative Farms

So experts with the peanut center are doing the next best thing:
they’re building representative model farms.

Each farm is a composite made by five or six farms of similar
size, location and production practices from 10 growing regions
in Georgia, Florida, Alabama and South Carolina. County extension
agents helped select the growers.

“Any time an issue comes up from a regulatory- or policy-type
avenue, we’d be able to take these (model) farms and see how
they’d be impacted,” Fletcher said.

This type of information would allow peanut farmers to know ahead
of time how an issue might affect their farms. So they’d be
better able to consider how to respond.

“Say that water becomes restricted,” Fletcher said. “We can run
this through (the models), analyze it and see how it will affect
the viability and the cash flow of the operation.”

Nationally Recognized

The peanut project has been developed using similar, nationally
recognized models developed for other crops by the Agricultural
and Food Policy Center at Texas A&M.

It’s funded by the farmer-supported National Peanut Board through
the Southeastern Peanut Research Initiative.

The center is also involved with an in-depth peanut survey that
will gather information from 700 to 800 farmers in Georgia,
Florida and Alabama.

“The producers that have been contacted need to make sure they
participate in this survey,” Fletcher said.

The survey, coupled with the representative farms, could help
ease the peanut industry through its current transition. It
should make the “what if … ?” less daunting than it’s been in
the past.