Peanut Season Reflections from 2023: Slow Development, Strong Lessons, and Key Considerations for 2024

Written by: Dan Anco
Extension Peanut Specialist, Clemson University

Emerging from 2023

2023, the time has come to bid thee goodbye. Yet before the year is cast completely into the sea of forgetfulness, we can bring to mind a few things from this past season.

After a challenging and slow start to the year, growing conditions in 2023 overall improved as the season developed. While this certainly helped and was appreciated, the year remained impacted. Cool and wet conditions during planting contributed to uneven stand emergence and resulted in a slow start.

Comparing straight degree days from April 20 through Oct 31 for 2023 at Blackville, SC were about 94% that of 2022 (3412 vs 3644). Though there were a few extended dry spells, 2023 tended to overall have more rain (38 vs 21”).

Maturity tended to develop slower as well, and while yields in many cases did fairly good, it was not uncommon for grades to be a few points lower. Pod OBB values in our Virginia maturity test on average were about 14% lower in 2023 than in 2022 for the same number of days. Likewise, runner maturity test OBB values were ~11% lower in 2023.

When time allowed, leaving runners in the field for extended amounts of time, in some cases over 160 days, often had higher yields and decent grade, even if maturities didn’t finish out to high levels.

Based on the past year, there have begun to be questions as to how seed quality will be going into 2024. Hopefully growing conditions during planting next year will be good for planting and establishing stands, even if there are questions on seed.

If 2023 was the first year a new cultivar was tried out on farm, it can be helpful to keep some of these context points in mind when evaluating its performance. Yet still, uncontrolled factors like the weather of a given year lend themselves as a testament to the value of including a control when we experiment with or try out a new variety or practice. Though practically speaking, we cannot do it all all the time.

2023 was also a year where we saw heightened tomato spotted wilt virus infection again, as well as white mold/stem rot. The latter characteristically was more so associated with fields having prior histories of it, whereas TSW could be found more readily across the state.

We recently had a paper published comparing efficacy and profitability of many available in-furrow insecticides across cultivar TSW susceptibility: https://peanutscience.com/article/id/1602/.

While we cannot always completely escape TSW infection, if we had more than we would have liked to this past year in our field, looking back over our individual practices and varieties can help to identify candidate areas to modify going into next year.