Georgia peanut farmers have to contend with a lot of weeds to
produce their $400
million crop. Soon, though, a computer program will take the
guesswork out of peanut
weed control.
University of Georgia scientists developed the software, called
HERB for Peanuts,
along with researchers at North Carolina State and the
University of Florida.
They designed the program to be used on a palmtop computer
farmers can carry into
the field. The farmer checks out his fields and enters data on
the weeds he’s trying to
get rid of.
“The farmer punches in a few numbers and gets instant advice on
how to control the
weeds in his fields,” said David Bridges, a UGA weed scientist
at the Georgia
Experiment Station in Griffin. He is working on the project with
Greg MacDonald, a
UGA weed scientist in Tifton.
“The advice is individualized,” Bridges said. “The computer
makes recommendations
based on the farmer’s visual analysis of his field.”
Georgia farmers grow the peanuts for about half of the peanut
butter made in the
United States. They send nearly 700 million pounds of nuts to
peanut butter factories
each year.
HERB, though, isn’t just a peanut program. Researchers developed
the program in
1991 for use in soybean fields. Today, growers and consultants
can get HERB for
Soybeans at 121 county extension offices in Georgia.
“We wanted to develop the program for peanuts first,” Bridges
said. “But we didn’t
have the data. So we began with soybeans. Peanuts are the most
important Georgia
crop. Farmers apply tons of herbicides to peanuts each year.
It’s a herbicide-intensive
crop.”
HERB for Peanuts consists of a data base of 78 weed species and
the damage each can
cause.
“The farmer keys in the grower-specific information, including
size, crop, weed
species and soil type,” Bridges said. “HERB then provides damage
estimates, including
decrease in profit as a result of the weeds. And it tells which
herbicides to use and the
net gain per acre as a result.”
In some cases, the cost to kill the weeds outweighs the
benefit. “These are the kinds of
things farmers need to know before they take action,” Bridges
said.
Researchers are now running the final field tests on the HERB
peanut program. A
Georgia Department of Agriculture and Environmental Protection
Agency Region IV
grant enabled them to provide palmtop computers for county
extension agents in 10
peanut-producing counties.
The extension agents are using the computers to test the program
in their counties.
They’re testing it in 20 Georgia growers’ fields under real-
world conditions.
The UGA weed scientists’ goals are to keep supporting the HERB
soybean program,
release the final version of the peanut program in 1998 and then
begin work on a cotton
program.
