Georgia farmers are now planting, or have just completed
planting, their major row crops: tobacco, peanuts, corn and
cotton. And depending on the crop, it’s the best planting time
in years or just another tough start.

Tobacco trouble

Wet weather in early April delayed tobacco transplanting by
about three weeks, said J. Michael Moore, a tobacco agronomist
with the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and
Environmental Sciences. That could become a problem later in
the season.

Damp conditions hindered applying some chemicals that are
important to tobacco’s early growth. This can lead to
diseases.

If you’re a tobacco farmer, “dry weather will worry you, but
wet weather can ruin you,” Moore said.

Tobacco farmers transplant baby plants from field-grown seed
beds and greenhouses into their fields. Disease has already
hurt these transplants, he said. Farmers expect some of them to
die or perform poorly.

There is one bright side. “Tomato spotted wilt virus levels are
starting out lower this year than we’ve seen in previous
years,” Moore said. TSWV is a deadly disease in tobacco.

Tobacco farmers had a poor crop last year. For this reason,
Georgia growers plan to plant a little more tobacco, about
29,440 acres this year. Georgia’s quota poundage, the amount of
tobacco the federal government allows the state’s farmers to
sell, will be 64,308,546 pounds.

Best in years

Peanut farmers “are sitting on about the best situation they’ve
seen in many years,” said John Beasley, a UGA Extension Service
peanut agronomist. Good soil moisture from rain and warm
weather mean good planting conditions for peanuts

About 5 percent of the crop had been planted by the first of
May. “We expect most of the peanuts to be planted over the next
three weeks,” Beasley said.

Due in part to the new way peanuts are marketed in the United
States and new regions of the state planting the crop, Beasley
expects Georgia farmers this year to plant about 550,000 acres
of peanuts, 10 percent more than last year.

Most of the Georgia corn crop is planted, and the crop is
growing fast, said Dewey Lee, a UGA agronomist. Corn requires a
lot of water to grow well. So far, it’s getting it naturally
through rainfall, with no need of irrigation. That’s good.

The rain has washed away sulfur, an important nutrient, from
the soil. This has thrown off the crop’s fertility balance. But
farmers should be able to manage the problem with little loss
of yields, he said.

Having to adjust to strong rainfall “is a good problem to
have,” Lee said. It’s a problem Georgia corn growers haven’t
had in a long time. They’re expected to plant about 370,000
acres.

About a fourth of Georgia’s expected 1.4 million acres of
cotton had been planted by the first of May, said Steve Brown,
a UGA cotton agronomist.

“We’re off to a pretty good start,” he said. “We’re in the best
shape we’ve been in several, several years.”

Cotton prices are better now than they were a year ago, too,
said Don Shurley, a UGA cotton economist. For much of the
current planting season, prices have hovered around 60 cents
per pound. That’s 20 cents better than this time last year.

But cotton prices, he said, have started to decline, due partly
to weakened foreign demand and textile mill business.

Better mood

“We’re in a much better mood than we’ve been in the past,” said
Marty McLendon, a cotton and peanut farmer in Calhoun County in
southwest Georgia. “We have moisture in the ground, and the
(irrigation) ponds are full.

“And if you could predict with accuracy how the weather will be
during this growing season,” McLendon said, “I can tell you
what kind of mood I’ll be in come harvest time. We’ll wait and
see.”