Peanut Grower Editor
It’s a simple fact of life that we all need something to look forward to. Whatever that “something” is, it provides a crucial mental lift that offers you a respite from today’s reality. That something in peanut production may have been found in a recent presentation at the South Carolina peanut grower’s meeting in January.
At the meeting, Josey Peele, senior engineer of AMADAS Industries, discussed technological advances in peanut harvesting with a review and a look at the future. His review went all the way back before the 1900s, but I will skip ahead to this century.
For the nearly quarter century from 2000 to 2024, Peele calls this a period of increased efficiency and precision with many advancements. His examples included that the standard pull-type combine is three times bigger than a decade before. Unload-on-the-go and dump carts increased field efficiency by 20% to 25%. Diggers now include speed monitors to improve setup, and Global Positioning System guidance and AutoSteer become the standard for peanut digging. With self-propelled combines, 10-row harvesting has become more practical, and also rotary peanut combines had been introduced in the United States.
Increased efficiency on the peanut farm has been a necessity since average yields have gone from 2,500 pounds per acre to 4,000 pounds per acre. Today’s combines can pick 1,000 pounds per minute, and a six-row digger and combine can harvest one acre every 20 minutes.
But this is what we have now. What is it that we can look forward to?
Peele says that 2025 is the precipice of change in that what will happen in the next decade in peanut farming is what has happened in cotton and grain over the past 30 years. In other words, we will see yield monitoring and mapping, on board in-shell moisture measurement, fully integrated in-cab controls, in-field combine telematics, vision-based monitoring and “the smart combine.”
Part of the reason peanuts lag behind these other commodities is simply based on economies of scale, Peele says. Peanuts average 1.6 million acres in the United States, whereas corn, soybeans and wheat total 223 million acres.
“There are thousands of grain combines sold each year but only a few hundred peanut combines are sold each year,” Peele says. Overcoming actual physical limitations unique to the peanut industry has also been a challenge.
Still, if there’s something we can eagerly anticipate, then that’s what we all need to do. Seeing these innovations come to fruition is something to look forward to.
