BEN HILL COUNTY, Ga. — The rain ending April was just enough to ease the severe drought gripping the state and allow planting for one of Georgia’s premier crops: peanuts.
Fourth-generation peanut farmer Kenny Ray Davis Jr., of Ben Hill County, said Georgia peanut farmers like to plant around the middle of April. That didn’t happen this year.
“Been waiting on rain,” he said. “We finally got our first rain — literally close to two months, we’d been without rainfall here. It was just dry.
“But it’s May now. It’s time to go.”
So Davis is planting this week. Joe Boddiford of the Georgia Peanut Commission said Davis has not been alone waiting for conditions to improve so he could get to work.
“I hadn’t had a rain in, I think, seven weeks,” Boddiford said. “The top of the ground is just bone dry.”
Boddiford said he expects other peanut farmers who make up the state’s $2.2 billion annual industry to use the recent rain to get into the field. But just because drought made planting wait, it doesn’t mean harvest time can wait on the other end.
“We’ve got to do a lot of work in a short amount of time and then we hope that the Lord is going to continue to give us favorable rainfall from here on out,” Boddiford said.
Davis said he will be racing the clock, too.
“It’ll be wide open,” he said. “We’re planting around 100 acres a day, 120 acres a day.”
1,000 acres is the goal. It works out to about a 10-day time frame, though Davis said he could go to the end of May.
“We’ll put the time the hours in to be sure we get this crop in,” Davis said.
Even if, he said, that means running tractors through the night.
This story comes to 229 Life through a reporting partnership with GPB News, a non-profit newsroom covering the state of Georgia.
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