Peanut Research in North Carolina to Yield High-Oleic Varieties

At last Thursday’s 60th annual NC Peanut Growers Association and meeting, many topics were covered, including disease resistance, and new high-oleic varieties on the horizon. Dr. David Jordan, Peanut Specialist with NC State University Extension was a presenter:

“We do have a lot of good work that is foundational to peanut growers and what they will see. Of the 9000 plots, a lot of that is Dr. Isleib’s breeding program. He does many crossed to come up with the varieties that we have today. We also have a lot of disease, insect, weeds and agronomy research. One issue we have tried to address this year is early season thrips management, so we had a lot of plots that dealt with insecticide and how that interacts with planting dates.

Dr. Shew had done a lot of work with screening fungicides and seeing how they are affected by variety selection. She also incorporates the advisory system that we have to get a very good handle on making recommendations.
 

Historically, all of our varieties have been a step up each time they are released. Bailey and Sugg are the two varieties right now that show the most promise because of their disease resistance.
 

The plan is for varieties in the future to all be high-oleic, though it could take a number of years to get there.

 The issue for peanuts is that if you have non-high-oleic and high-oleic in the field you might be able to separate them, but when you get to the buying point it’s a huge challenge to keep those separated.

The name Bailey came from Jack Bailey was a plant pathologist at NC State, who worked on the station here a lot. He passed away ten years ago from a rare form of cancer. Sugg was named after Joe Sugg who was the director of the Peanut Growers Association years ago.
 

One of the challenges is taking a traditional variety like Bailey and you incorporate the high-oleic trait, what do you call that because it is a new variety. It could be a brand new name or possibly Bailey II.
 

We have the peanut field day here every year the first Thursday after Labor Day.”
 

Dr. David Jordan, Peanut Specialist with NC State University Extension