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November 10, 2005: “Growing peanuts
is hard. Growing organic peanuts is really hard,” weed
researcher Dr. Carroll Johnson says as he scans his checkerboard
of test plots in south Georgia. He stoops down to pull a blade
of Texas panicum, a pernicious grass, from a lush mat of crimson
clover and peanut seedlings. He’s watching his crew
use a flame-weeder to at the Coastal Plain Experiment Station
in Tifton, Georgia.
Using that tool is one of many experiments Johnson has conducted
in recent years to help Southern farmers break into a market
that is growing like … well, like a weed. Chuck Schmidt,
who works in peanut butter sales and marketing, conservatively
estimates a supply shortfall of 8-10 million pounds this year
for just his processed product. Because Southeastern peanuts
are notoriously flavorful and large, the lucrative snack and
health-food market also beckons.
While the Deep South produces 75 percent of U.S. peanuts,
most organic peanuts are grown in the Southwest. There, the
arid climate makes organic production easier than in the Southeast—a
region where weeds and disease spread faster than rumors of
whiskey on a Baptist’s breath.
Sporadic attempts at organic peanut research and small-scale
production in the 1990s didn’t take hold. In 2004, farmer
Shirley Daughtry in Effingham County, Georgia, near Savannah,
produced the only known commercially-grown certified organic
peanuts in Georgia—a quarter acre, compared to 675,000
acres in conventional production where they are grown in rotation
with cotton and corn.
In 2003, however, Carroll Johnson began his research, and
joined with other researchers to form relationships with farmers
and the non-profit Georgia Organics. This year, approximately
40 on-farm and research acres are in production in Georgia,
South Carolina, and North Carolina, supported largely by a
new three-year $160,000 SARE grant. Grant coordinator Dr.
Mark Boudreau, a sustainable farming consultant, says this
is the ideal time to try organic peanuts in the South. “There’s
a unique convergence of factors: the availability of new varieties,
increased peanut acreage in general, high demand for organics,
and generally low prices for conventional peanuts.”
Conservation tillage: Fertile ground for
organics?
Horticulturalist Dr. Sharad Phatak hopes his 20 years of
work on conservation tillage in Georgia will provide fertile
ground for a transition to organic peanuts. Phatak began experiments
with no-till peanuts in the early 1990s after a decade of
conservation tillage work in vegetable crops. In 1990, his
first no-till, pesticide-free peanuts planted into rye yielded
well. He experimented with crimson clover as well, again with
positive results. His peanuts developed well, despite fears
that having peanuts (a legume) follow a leguminous cover crop
would lead to disease problems or nematodes.
Other researchers, including Johnson, are now experimenting
with cover crops and organic peanuts, primarily for weed control,
integrating new herbicides and other techniques into their
experiments. Early in his learning curve with conservation
tillage, Johnson tried to control annual grasses, nutsedge,
and morning glories by strip-tilling peanuts into mowed rye.
The weeds emerged with a vengeance in the row, right where
he couldn’t get them.
He then undertook no-till experiments with crimson clover,
a winter annual. Once the clover dried down, his crew flail-mowed
it and planted C-11-2-39, a new cultivar developed by Dr.
Corley Holbrook, a USDA peanut geneticist in Tifton. The cultivar
spreads well, shading many weeds with a thick canopy. It has
also demonstrated excellent germination and strong disease
resistance. “I was amazed. This variety was able to
survive and thrive after an attack of fungus,” farmer
Shirley Daughtry said.
An unusually wet season continuously sprouted an impossibly
thick mat of self-reseeded clover that shaded out weeds early
in the season and gave the peanuts a strong start. Grasses
poked through in time, though, and created a formidable jungle.
Even so, Johnson says the clover plots could yield decently
and they showed the most promise for economically viable weed
control overall. “The less soil disturbance, the better,
it seems,” he said. His crew hand weeded twice—
an inevitability for organic peanuts, Johnson thinks.
Last year, researchers at the USDA National Peanut Research
Laboratory in Dawson, Georgia, began experimenting with no-till
organic peanuts and cotton in an oat cover crop, which created
a punishing weed problem. This year, the peanuts went into
rye and the cotton into a rye-clover mix to add nitrogen to
the soil. They planted in single rows and rolled the cover
crops twice.
It looks better than last year, but “we’re still
not getting enough weed control, even with cover crops,”
said agricultural economist Marshall Lamb, who heads up the
study. He wonders if conventional tillage will still win out
in such a weedy region. “If they can’t get weed
control with cover crops, farmers will need bare ground to
cultivate,” he said.
To suppress weeds in conservation tillage, Phatak developed
a longer-term cropping system with longer-maturing new varieties,
cash crops, and soil fertility. The 18-month cycle begins
with an October planting of rye. The rye is harvested in June,
followed with no-till velvet bean—an excellent feed
for cattle with a small seed market as well. The velvet beans
come off the field in the fall and the debris smothers the
soil through the winter, ready for early planting.
After the first trial, “there was not a single weed
in that field anywhere,” he said, but he couldn’t
monitor results in the next season. In a new plot, currently
in the velvet bean phase, he saw a 90 percent reduction in
weeds this year.
Conventional tillage doable, but expensive
Despite other intentions, most farmers experimenting with
organic peanuts this year used conventional tillage. Emile
DeFelice, who raises pastured pork near Columbia, South Carolina,
hadn’t planned on peanuts and didn’t have time
to plant a cover crop on his 20-acre field. “We disked
the bejeezus out of it,” he admitted.
They got a good stand of peanuts—and a great stand
of grasses and pigweed. They bush hogged periodically just
above the peanut stems to give light, which saved the crop
from out-competition, but DeFelice anticipates about one-third
of an average yield if the nuts mature.
Relinda Walker, an organic vegetable farmer in Screven County,
Georgia, also near Savannah, hoped to plant no-till into wheat,
but unseasonable rains waterlogged her fields. She instead
chose her 10-acre rye field, but weeds had already emerged,
so she tilled it all under and planted in twin rows. “It
would have been suicide to plant into that many weeds,”
she said. To manage weeds, her crew cultivated three times
and hand weeded twice.
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Nearby in Effingham County, Daughtry strip-tilled into winter
wheat and tilled conventionally into another plot. The rains
soaked her wheat field and prevented germination, and bermuda
grass emerged worse than before in the strips, so she abandoned
it. She had hoped to try corn gluten for weed control on the
remaining three-quarter acre but could not find any non-genetically-modified
gluten available. Instead, she cultivated twice and hand weeded
three times on half of her plot; the other half--planted in
a different variety--she hand weeded occasionally. Early yield
estimates show 3,000 lbs/acre--roughly three times last year's
yield--despite the weeds. This year's conventional peanut
average was 3,100 lbs/acre.
In addition to propane flaming—an effective option
for broadleaf weed problems—Johnson and USDA Peanut
Lab researchers are exploring OMRI-approved herbicides. This
year, tests with a clove-oil-based herbicide and a fatty-acid-based
herbicide (also hand weeded multiple times) created the cleanest
fields that could produce above-average yields. But, Johnson
reminded, they can be 10 to 20 times more expensive than conventional
herbicides. Close planting to achieve a canopy looks more
promising,
“The longer I’m in this kind of work,”
Johnson says, “the more I’m convinced that the
future of organic peanut production is in cultural practices
and hand weeding. The production economics are dictating that
[purchased products] aren’t viable options.”
Beyond the market
Organic pioneer Daughtry is pursuing organics to make Georgia
healthier. She grew up in a top peanut producing county in
Georgia and saw many neighbors and family members die of cancer,
which she attributes mostly to pesticide exposure. With the
state’s extensive peanut acreage, “if we can change
peanut production in Georgia, think of what the environmental
and health benefits would be.”
Walker thinks organic peanuts are one of the best bets for
the South to break into the organic market as a whole. “Farmers
already know how to grow peanuts and consumers are familiar
with them. They’re accessible,” she said. “They’re
easier to grow organically in the South than vegetables.”
There’s lots of hard work, innovation and collaboration
to go. “You’ve got to be willing to be creative
and open to new approaches,” Johnson says. He’s
optimistic that they’re finally progressing. “Last
year I was a bit beleaguered with our lack of progress. We’ve
still got a long ways to go, but a few things we’re
seeing this year lead me to think we’re now headed down
the right path.” 
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