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Helping Peanut Producers Optimize Harvest Timing with the aGDD Tracker

Agronomy & Pest Management

Mark Mauldin
Agriculture & Natural Resources Agent
University of Florida
Chipley

Abstract

Peanuts are a major agronomic crop in the Panhandle of Florida. Timing harvest so that both yield and grade are maximized is essential to the economic sustainability of peanut producers. Optimizing harvest timing can be challenging for growers for a variety of reasons: 1) peanuts are an indeterminant crop, 2) pods grow underground, out of sight, 3) temperature and available moisture greatly impact the speed with which a peanut crop matures. To assist growers with optimizing harvest timing by tracking crop maturity throughout the season, members of the Florida Peanut Team developed and published the aGDD Tracker.  The Tracker presented aGDD data generated by Peanut Field Agronomic Resource Manager (PeanutFARM), an online platform that is tied to Florida Automated Weather Network (FAWN) weather stations. The Tracker showed data for 10 locations and 14 different planting dates (140 different hypothetical fields). The Tracker generated no new data – it was simply a way to combine, organize, and share aGDD data that may not have been as easily accessible from other sources. Growers could follow whichever field(s) most closely approximated their own and see how aGDDs accumulated throughout the season, providing valuable insight for harvest decisions. The Tracker was updated and posted 11 times throughout the 2021 growing season on the Panhandle Agriculture eNews website. Each posting of The Tracker was accompanied by a “Peanut Update” consisting of a recent weather summary, field observations/conditions and related IPM recommendations. The posts were viewed approximately 1,400 times on the Panhandle Agriculture eNews website. Several of the posts were republished in a variety of trade publications furthering their reach. Input from producers and agents indicated that both the information in The Tracker and the updates were useful and served the intended goal of helping to inform harvest timing and IPM decisions. The aGDD Tracker was an excellent utilization of pre-existing resources (PeanutFARM, FAWN, Panhandle Agriculture eNews); combining them in a way that delivered timely, specific, and actionable information to growers. The project is planned to be repeated during the 2022 growing season.  

Authors: Mark Mauldin, Ethan Carter, Camila Ribera, Barry Tillman
  1. Mark Mauldin Agriculture & Natural Resources Agent, University of Florida, Florida, 32428
  2. Ethan Carter Row Crop / IPM Regional Specialized Agent, University of Florida, Florida, 32448
  3. Camila Ribera Graduate Student, Agronomy, University of Florida, Florida, 32446
  4. Barry Tillman Professor, Agronomy, University of Florida, Florida, 32446