- Gary
Welcome to Searching for the Brighter Pod, a podcast about peanuts. I'm your host, Gary Little, and with me is North Carolina Peanut Extension Specialist Dr. David Jordan. David, how are you doing this week? I'm doing well, Gary. I just got a cup of coffee out of your office, so I'm feeling pretty good right now. Well, that's good. You paid for the coffee, sir.
- David
Well, I appreciate your welcome to the asset. You know, small details, small details. And we did move through the weekend with the hurricanes and the remnants of that. And as far as I know, from an agricultural standpoint. We didn't get excessive damage or excessive flooding.
- Gary
Okay. So how did the weather up until now impact the harvest so far?
- David
Yeah, so our weather this fall has been good for harvest for the most part. We had a nor'easter and some rain there. But in general, when we caught some of the rains that we would often say, once we had the harvest, we'd like to... to be dry or as dry as we can. But some of the rains helped us from a digging standpoint. That was, I think most of the peanuts now are dug. So the rain over the weekend from the storm or the remnants of the storm probably didn't affect things that much. But there are still a few peanuts out. So that probably will help soften those soils unless somebody got inundated. But it rained some maybe last weekend or... 10 days ago, those rains helped us more than they hurt us in terms of people feeling it today. So we dodged a bullet in terms of excessive rain. I looked at rainfall amounts scattered in the coastal plain this morning, which would have reflected rain over the weekend, Saturday and Sunday. And I think down in the White Bull area, at least at the station, they got over that period of time around an inch or so. But most other places had less than that.
- Gary
Okay.
- David
And as I say that, there's always somebody caught a lot of rain that could hold them back. I know we got some pretty big rainfall here in Raleigh at some of those storm rains were pretty big issues yesterday afternoon.
- Gary
Yes. Okay. How are yields? And we haven't talked about it, I don't think, but the market grades this fall going.
- David
Yeah, so Yulter... I'd say yields for the region, North Carolina as well, I think they're going to be below average. And folks will ask, what's your average yield? And my average yield, Mel, is about 4,200 pounds per acre. And I think that generally reflects if we have typical whirling conditions and we have a good fall to get the crop out, we'll hit a state average of about 4,200 pounds. We can certainly creep up from there, but... 4,200 pounds, I think, is a good average. This year, I think we're going to be below that, maybe 100 pounds, maybe 150 pounds below that. So our yields are going to be off to a degree. I think we had just a couple of things, I think, contributed to that. It's the dry weather that we had in the summer, especially if we think about the month of August and into September, we had very limited rainfall. We also had some dry periods of time in June, and some high temperatures. One of the thoughts on that is when you have high temperatures during the initial flowering, that some of those flowers, you just don't have the pollination that you would like to have. You just don't have the pegs that are set for those. So sometimes I think we can trace our lower yields back to some of those hot, dry conditions that we had earlier in the cropping cycle. So that's from a yield standpoint. And just to give a quick update, I think we're probably at, before the weekend, we were probably 85% of our peanuts were dug. There were still some out there. I think with the rain, generally speaking, not having a tremendous impact on us getting back in the field. And the weather forecast is really good for field drying. I would think by the end of this week and through the weekend, we might have almost all the crops. So we're making great progress there. We're probably at 45 or so percent. of fields that are harvested or threshed at this point in time. So we're making good progress. So that's a kind of reflection on yield. If you think about market grades, and I know many folks that are listening to this, all 22 of them, maybe Gary, which we're hoping for, maybe a few more, probably know a little bit about peanuts and the market grades. But when a farmer takes their peanuts in, to a buying point, a sample is taken. They've got a really good system in place to do that. to make it unbiased. And so that sample comes in, it's weighed, and then the sampling or the grading process is sorting a whole bunch of steps through there. So at the end of the day, what you'd like to have is a high percentage of total salamander kernels. You'd like to have as few loose shell kernels. I wanted to say lesser corn stalk boards. You want to have fewer of those too. few blue shell kernels and damaged kernels. So I think grades are probably maybe average. It's hard to tell, but we are having some challenges or I'm hearing about a little bit of issues with some aflatoxin or aflabus in some loads. We'll see with 45% of the crop harvested where just now there's a lag period on. on hearing about it and we'll be learning about the crop for the next month because there's still peanuts to pick and and peanuts to be graded so the hot dry conditions influence aspergillus flavus the the pathogen that produces the toxin and so we certainly had some hot dry conditions this this summer and the damage is usually in the the lucio kernel damage kernel fractions. In any situation where soil can move in with the kernels, that's where you'll tend to have aflatoxin contamination. It's a major issue. I mean, it's something to be concerned about in the sense that from a farmer's standpoint, if you have Aspergillus flavus, there's a high potential that that load is going to be crushed for oil at roughly 30 or 40 percent of the value of. your normal contract. So it's a big issue, but aflatoxin is something we don't want in our, our peanuts at work at Sib.
- Gary
All right. Thank you. So what's in store for the next week besides seeing who's going to be playing in the world series?
- David
Well, that's a, you know, the, that's a great, that is a great point. We know who's not going to be playing. And that would be my favorite team, the Orioles. Certainly understand that the Yankees are out now as well.
- Gary
You don't even have a mascot now.
- David
Yeah, the Orioles don't have a mascot, apparently. It's stuff up in Baltimore. Stay safe. But I'd say over the next week or so, it fortunately doesn't appear that we're overly wet out in the state. Farmers, and it was dry, so whatever moisture we got. probably went my own in. Farmers should be able to get back in. I know it's pretty warm today. This is Monday, but it's going to cool down as we move through the end of the week. But it looks like we've got sunny conditions and I think that'll really help people move along and get the crop out. And I think that's, you know, again, what everybody's focused on is trying to get what's out there out of the field, get it to the buying stations or buying points, get it graded. And then. move on to other things and certainly plans for next year. So I think we're in a typical October pattern of we're hoping to get the crop out. There are some folks that plant wheat or small grains after peanuts. That's been a pretty good combination. So I know we're going to have some folks that are, once they get their peanuts out, they're going to prepare those fields and get some wheat planted in those fields.
- Gary
Okay, thank you. And thank you for listening. This has been Searching for the Brighter Pod. You can contact us at brighterpod at gmail.com or on the web at go.ncsu.edu slash brighterpod. And we thank you for listening.
