As the federal government ponders the future of farm
programs, one research group is
preparing for life with or without price supports.
The Peanut
Collaborative
Research Support Program is finding worldwide
solutions now that may help Georgia
farmers in the future.
“Peanuts are a global crop with global problems,” said
John
Williams, assistant program
director of the Peanut CRSP at the University of Georgia Agricultural
Experiment Station in Griffin.
“Peanuts have leaf spot wherever they grow,” he
said. “Wherever peanuts
are grown, used or stored, aflatoxin is a problem. The
research we support in utilization
has no boundaries. Some of it is focused on small
producers, but that’s scale. Those
technologies can be scaled up much easier than scaled
down.”
The Peanut CRSP uses international research to solve
the global and domestic problems
of growing peanuts.
“The Peanut CRSP is the outcome of an act of Congress
to deploy the skills and
knowledge of the land-grant system for development,”
Williams said. “The goal is
to achieve peanut technology that helps both developing
countries and the United
States.”
One of the program’s major focuses is creating new
peanut products.
“Developing products outside the United States promotes
consumption, which
encourages exports and trade,” Williams said.
Scientists at the UGA Center for Food
Safety and Quality Enhancement in Griffin add to the
program. They’ve focused on
product development in the Philippines and Thailand and
post-harvest handling and storage
in Jamaica and Belize. In 1996, a new project began in
Bulgaria.
One of the greatest possibilities for U.S. farmers is
oil.
“The potential is spectacular for peanuts,” Williams
said. “The oil from
peanuts, from a health perspective, equals the quality of
olive oil.” Olive oil sells
for three to four times the price of other oils.
“We’re working to help expand that quality market. And
we’re going to be promoting
these desirable high-oleic oils so people move to frying
with healthier oils,”
Williams said.
“The general peanut oil isn’t as healthy as canola or
olive oil. But these new
ones are,” he said. “They match very closely with olive
oil’s health qualities.
Down the road, it’s going to be really important.”
The CRSP research also enables farmers to grow peanuts
with lower input costs.
“On a global scale, a sustained development of
technologies has led to better
varieties,” Williams said. “There are a number of
components of that. One is
developing and accessing germ plasm. Many of the problems
with peanuts have cheap
solutions in the genetics.”
That long-term investment into resistance is going to
be important.
“The people outside the United States have been more
concerned up until now,
because they’ve had to compete on a world-price basis,” he
said. “So for them,
cheap technology to control diseases has a greater
priority than here.”
The long-term survival of the American peanut industry
may depend on using such
technology.
“Certainly it could help reduce chemical inputs,” he
said. “And you will
have to use other technologies like integrated pest
management that use resistance,
management techniques and a small amount of chemicals.”
One of the CRSP successes is research that takes genes
from wild relatives and puts
them into peanuts to create resistances. Farmers now can
buy varieties resistant to leaf
spot disease, which costs Georgia farmers $100 to $150 per
acre per year for chemical
control.
“The opportunity is there through resistances to cut
that to $50 per acre,”
Williams said.
The Peanut CRSP can show a $10 U.S. return for every $1
spent from the release of new
varieties, he said.
“When the program was started there was a great deal of
cry about why Congress was
spending all this money to make other countries more
competitive,” Williams said.
“That probably has changed.”
