Peanut season set to beat the previous
Farmer picks ‘fairly handy’ peanut crop
IT’S been a better season than the last, but peanut farmer Julian Cross described it as “a funny season”.
Despite a late start to planting, Mr Cross said the season should provide a “fairly handy crop”.
“Normally you plant mid-October to early November, but we didn’t get any planting rain so we didn’t plant until the start of December,” he said.
“We had a bit of rain real early, and then a heatwave through January but that didn’t affect them too much because they were so young. Then we had really good rain through February.
“We had a bit of a dry finish, which means the quality of the peanuts will be back a bit. Maybe a couple of hundred dollars a tonne.”
Mr Cross is currently in the process of picking his 100 hectare peanut crop.
“This year we will probably average 3.25 tonnes per hectare,” he said.
In his 35 years of growing peanuts, Mr Cross said he
❝be It used to every farmer had a paddock of peanuts.
— Julian Cross
had seen the number of people growing peanuts in his region start to dwindle.
“We’re in Kumbia about 30km south of Kingaroy,” he said.
“There are only about half a dozen peanut growers south of Kingaroy now. It used to be every farmer had a paddock of peanuts.
“The land use has changed a fair bit. There is a lot of grazing, fruit trees, watermelons, and people growing grass for hay around here now.”
Australian peanut growers struggle to meet the demand for peanuts in Australia, and many of them are imported.
“We compete against imported ones,” Mr Cross said.
“We get a slight premium over the imported ones, but the world price controls the market a fair bit.”