It’s peanut planting time in South Carolina. Scott Montford, Peanut Specialist with the Edisto Research Station near Blackville, SC says the biggest limiting factor right now is moisture:
“It depends on where you’re at in the state. Up in the southern part of the state…southeastern part of the state where we’re at at Edisto, we’re lackin in moisture, there’s some out there but not a lot . so, it’s going to hold up some farmers from planting, and in some areas, like I said, we’re going to wait for rain. Up above the lakes in South Carolina we’ve got a little bit more moisture, they seem to be catching a little bit more rain than we are down south, and it looks like they’re moving on with some planting this week and next.”
Peanut acreage in South Carolina will be up again this year, according to Montfort:
“Unless something drastically goes wrong, we’re going to be somewhere close to 90 or so thousand acres I would think.”
Montfort explains peanut acreage has been a moving target for a while now:
“Well, it’s a been a moving target the last five or six years, you know, we’ve been somewhere around that 40 to 50-thousand range, and for the last four years, it’s continued to go up. Last year we were at 70, 75-thousand, and as you can see we’ve gone up another 15-thousand acres.”
Montfort cautions that it’s way too early to panic and get in a hurry on soybean planting:
“The biggest thing surrounding the moisture situation, you know we’ve still got some time here in South Carolina, just to kind of caution growers to not get in too big a hurry and plant peanuts in dry dirt and make sure we’ve got moisture. Right now, we’re not at a stage in which we have to panic in any sense of the word, we kind of want to wait and see if we get some more water, more rain, whatever before we start thinking about putting those things in dry dirt.”
Peanut specialist with Clemson University’s Edisto Research Station, Scott Montfort.
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