Price of peanuts per kg

Price of peanuts

INTRODUCTION

Peanut is widely used as an oilseed crop around the world and as a direct source of human food in the United States. Several species of peanut have been cultivated for their edible seeds, but only Arachis hypogaea

Price of peanuts

1. has been domesticated and widely distributed. Production in the United States is completely mechanized, but in many other regions the seeds are planted and harvested by hand. In the United States, approx- imately 70 percent of the peanuts are runners (small-seeded types of var. hypogaea), 20 percent are virginias (large-seeded types of var. hypogaea), 10 percent are spanish (var. vulgaris), and less than 1 percent are valen- cia (var. fastigiata) market types (Knauft and Gorbet 1989). Peruvian and aequatoriana types are produced in only a few countries in Central and South America in the United States, production is controlled by a federal price sup- port system that controls the quantity and guarantees a minimum price to the producer. Historically, it has been to the producer’s advantage to maximize yields by having large amounts of inputs during each crop year. Thus, in the United States, plant breeders have concentrated efforts on maximizing yields under the constraints of market acceptability. Large amounts of pesticides are applied to the crop and in recent years, breeding for insect and disease resistance has become a priority. In other regions of the world, especially in drier areas, there are few inputs used for subsistence production systems. Yields are restricted in most areas worldwide by diseases, especially leaf spots (Shokes and Culbreath 1997) and rust (Subrahmanyam 1997), and yield per hectare averages less than half of the United States production. Incorporating biotic stress tolerance is an objective of breeding efforts in areas where applying pesticides and fungicides is not economical. However, incorporating dis- ease resistance or tolerance tends to decrease yield potential. The crop improvement situation has dramatically changed within the past few years in the United States as restrictions for pesticide applications have been imposed and with the occurrence of diseases (e.g., tomato spotted wilt virus) for which no chemical controls are available. Thus, much of the plant breeding efforts are being redirected from only developing cultivars with high yields to ones that are also incorporating resistance genes to plant and seed pathogens.

Price of peanuts

Uniformity of commercial product has been promoted by the indus- try, so peanut breeding programs have selected new cultivars that closely match previous ones in size and quality traits. Cultivars that have had wide distribution are commonly used as parents in hybridization pro- grams, and thus the genetic base of peanut cultivars has historically been very limited. However, since the late 1980s, a large number of diverse cultivars have been released by private and public plant breeding pro- grams, and consequently the genetic base of commercially produced germplasm is much broader at the present time. Parental selection is an important consideration in plant breeding, and with uniformity require- ments imposed by the peanut industry, the genetic base of peanut will continue to be relatively narrow in the futurs.

In addition to the domesticated species, 68 wild species have been described (Krapovickas and Gregory 1994), and several additional ones have been collected but are without descriptors (Valls 2000). Arachis species are native to a large region of South America extending from the foothills of the Andes to the Atlantic and from the northern shores of Brazil to about 34S in Uruguay. Valls et al. (1985) reported that species distributions are nearly continuous, and there is an extensive amount of distributional overlap among taxa in different sections of the genus.

Table 6.2. Arachis species identities (type holotype unless other wise designated) (from Krapovickas and Gregory 1994; Stalker and Simpson 1995).

Price of peanuts

 Improved Drought Tolerance. The peanut plant is highly drought- tolerant and is grown in many areas of the world where most other food legumes will not produce a crop. However, insufficient water at the time of flowering and fruiting will significantly reduce yield. Further, aflatoxin contamination is mainly a problem in peanut that has been sub- jected to heat and drought stresses late in the growing season (Sanders et al. 1985). The issues surrounding agricultural water use are increas- ing in importance, and the development of cultivars with improved drought tolerance should help alleviate these concerns.

Price of peanuts

Drought tolerance may be enhanced by improvements in soil water extraction capability (Wright and Nageswara Rao 1994), or improvements in water use efficiency, or both (Hebbar et al. 1994). Rucker et al. (1995) evaluated drought tolerance characteristics of 19 peanut genotypes which differed in the size of their root systems. Under drought-stressed field conditions, these genotypes differed in canopy temperature and visual stress ratings, two potential measures of drought tolerance. Wright et al. (1994) demonstrated genetic differences in peanut for transpiration effi- ciency which is defined as g of dry matter produced per kg of water tran- spired. Measurements of transpiration and/or root biomass are difficult and therefore are not practical for use in large scale breeding efforts for improved drought tolerance, and the most common method of collecting peanut has been to gather samples in small markets in the primary and secondary centers of diver- sity in South America.also a large amount of diversity exists in these mar- kets because local farmers grow an array of genotypes. Samples are typically separated based on pod and seed characteristics (Stalker and Simpson 1995). Many markets have yielded up to 30 accessions, and Stalker and Simpson (1995) noted one market in Brazil that yielded 86 distinct lines which a greater amount of agronomic data can be obtained when collections are directly made from farmer’s fields. However, travel to individual locations is very time-consuming and in many cases, travel to remote areas is difficult because of poor or nonexisting roads. Lim- ited seed supply that is being saved for the next growing season is also problematic because farmers must retain ample seed stocks for planting during the following year. Sampling strategies for peanut have been summarized by Simpson (1985), who concluded that a 1 kg sample of seed is sufficient when the seeds are visually homogeneous for adequate division between the donor country and the participants on a collection trip, but larger samples are needed if variation exists. Because of the large seed size of peanut, handling large samples on germplasm expeditions is difficult. From 1959 to date, there have been more than 40 collection trips in South America for A. hypogaea and related peanut species (Stalker and Simpson 1995). In addition, J. Smartt introduced.

Price of peanuts

Interest on operating capital denotes chance cost. In this study the 2001 credit interest rate on agricultural production. Employing the inflation rate of the same year, real interest rate was obtained. The real interest rate as of 2001 was found as 22%. In this connection, since variable cost is distributed quite evenly in production period, half of this cost was considered. Besides, peanut growing covers a six-month period, the cost of interest on operating capital was calculated taking the half of the average interest rate for that year. The land charge was based on a cash rent equivalent. Hired labor charge was the price for unpaid labor. General farm overhead amounted to 3% of the total variable cost. Thus the production  cost  per  decare planted has been specified by considering fixed and variable costs.

Price of peanuts

–Gross value of production

was obtained by adding by-product value to the value of peanut production obtained by annual productive operations. Net farm income was calculated by substracting gross value of production per decare from production cost per decare. Relative income in peanut production was obtained by comparing gross value of production per decare to production cost per decare. And the gross income was calculated by substracting variable costs from gross value of production.

Production costs: Total economie cost of input use and total costs  in  order  to  realise   a   production operation in an agricultural organisation is the production cost.Therefore, the production cost is the total of fixed and variable costs. In the long term, all costs are variable costs in production operations whereas costs are divided into fixed and variable costs in the short term.

Price of peanuts

Net profit and relative profit: Net profit is obtained by substracting the production cost per decare  from  the gross value of production per decare.. By farm size whereas the average farm with peanut in Group 1 shows a net profit, farms in Group 3 shows a net profit. Therefore, peanut growers in Group 1 were unable to cover costs because their production cost was higher than the gross value of production. Their net profit showed minus value, so they lost income. That relative profit is obtained by comparing gross value of production to production cost.

Price of peanuts

As a sun,the  average  farm shows a relative profit of 123.46%. Organizations in Group 3 had the highest relative profit with 154.96%. It follows from this that these organizations had a return profit of 99%. These organizations’ relative profit was  invested due to low yield and high production cost.