By Leeann Culbreath
Georgia Organics

TIFTON, Ga. – A new line of peanut developed here could help
Southeastern farmers break into the expanding organic food
marketplace.

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)