Donalsonville, GA |

For a farmer, there’s nothing quite like seeing the fruits of your labor come to fruition, and farmers here in Georgia are getting to do a lot of that as the 2024 harvest season is in full swing. One farmer who’s busy doing that now is Brad Thompson, a peanut producer in Seminole County who is busy in his fields after a long growing season.

“We’ve had a really good harvest season so far. Hopefully in two days we’ll be through with the peanuts. We’ve started out and we’ve got very little rain. Of course, we had a threat from a hurricane and we got like probably three or four inches at one time, but that was nothing compared to what we could have got. We were really fortunate and dodged a bullet on that,” says Brad Thompson, Owner of Thompson Family Farms.

However, according to Thompson, despite having good harvest weather, the yields he’s getting are disappointing, as he says this past summer’s heat must have been too much for the crop despite most of it being under irrigation.

“Our yields are probably off 500-700 pounds and every year it seems like we’re dropping fifty pounds, one hundred pounds. I would say part of our yields being down, I guess it’s everybody’s guess because we’ve had years that we felt like our yields were going to be off and they were actually up, but this year I feel like it was the heat, the stress on the peanuts. The dryland was kind of average crop on dry land, but our irrigated crop, that’s where we were so much off and we’re about ninety-eight percent irrigated,” says Thompson.

According to Thompson, what’s most disappointing is the fact that this isn’t what he or any other producer needs right now, as he says the price for a great crop was already too low.

“This was a year that I was really hoping we was going to have an outstanding crop, because we really need it. The price of our inputs is going up. The price of equipment is just through the roof now. What it’s costing us an acre to plant a crop and harvest a crop is not really looking good on paper, not with the yields that we’re receiving. I really don’t know how we’re going to continue to go on, but I know a lot of people say, ‘well the prices in the grocery stores are up,’ but our commodities, we’re not getting any more for them than we did thirty years ago,” says Thompson.

Thompson says that despite the situation producers all over the state and country are in, he hopes to make it through this season, but is afraid that might not be the case for others that have endured many years of hardship and will have no choice but to call it quits.

“Last year, I would say that there was probably ten to fifteen percent of people that is not farming this year; backed out of farming. I would probably say we’re going to be looking at another fifteen to twenty percent that’s not going to be farming. Farming in general, it’s not about the money. It’s about planting a crop, growing a crop, and living for the Lord because really, that’s what keeps us going. I mean, it’s faith that next year’s going to be better, that things are going to get one day where we can relax,” says Thompson.

By: John Holcomb