Beginning Farmers

 

The primary mission of the Georgia Organic Peanut Association (GOPA) is to create markets for value-added agricultural products and support small and medium-sized farmers in the Southeast. Making farming profitable on less acreage is the best way to support limited-resource and new and beginning producers. Simply put, growing a crop that does not make money is a dead end, and it does not matter what anyone says about it being sustainable, organic, or regenerative.

Producing Certified Organic peanuts in the Southeast can be extremely difficult. Unlike their conventional neighbors, organic farmers do not have effective chemicals to draw on, especially not herbicides. Plants thrive in the humid subtropical environment, weeds as much as agronomic crops, and no natural or bio-based herbicide can keep up with the aggression of the likes of pigweed, nutsedge, and morningglory in the competition for sunlight and nutrients.

Picture of a mule-drawn tine weeder. From USDA Farmers Bulletin 1127: Peanut Growing for Profit, 1920.

Picture of a mule-drawn tine weeder. From USDA Farmers Bulletin 1127: Peanut Growing for Profit, 1920.

Organic farmers rely on peanuts’ vigor and resilience and timely mechanical cultivation to beat back weeds until the peanut plants can vine over and shade out the rows. This regime for weed control is purely scientific, and it has been developed by Dr. W. Carroll Johnson (retired) at the USDA Agricultural Research Service working, over the last 20 years, with the farmers that formed GOPA. Weeds must be attacked sometimes before they emerge, and farmers deploy a tine weeder — an obsolete tool on the modern conventional peanut farm — to scrape the soil surface and uproot weed seedlings.

The demand for Certified Organic products across the globe is only increasing, and there is a great urgency to share the knowledge of how to grow Certified Organic peanuts (and other crops) to the next generation of Certified Organic farmers in the Southeast.

If you are a new or beginning farmers (less than 10 years of experience), and you would like to learn more about how to grow and market Certified Organic peanuts successfully, please contact us using the form below.

 
 

These activities are supported by funding from the USDA NIFA Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program, award #2020-49400-32324.