vrijdag 15 januari 2016

Hi!

The peanut plant can be used in a crop rotation system. This is because the peanut plant is a nitrogen fixator as mentioned in another blog. In addition, Peanuts make a good rotational crop because they are drought-tolerant, require less labor than other alternatives and have good loan assistance support.
Peanut plants are not labour intensive. Once peanut harvesting became less labor intensive through mechanization, many more peanuts were grown for both food and oil production.
Strip tillage has been widely adopted by many peanut producers. With this method of tillage, the land is not turned but is subsoiled, and only a strip of soil in the row is tilled, while the soil between the rows remains undisturbed with cover crops or crop residue. This method of tillage reduces time and costs for land preparation and helps prevent erosion of the soil by wind and water. Yields of crops planted in conservation tillage systems are often different from conventional plantings. The residue on the surface lowers disease incidence of leaf spot, TSWV, white mold, and other diseases. In conventional tillage systems, the plant residue is incorporated into the soil resulting in more disease problems.


The USA has their own breeding program. This breeding program is to develop peanuts that can be drought tolerance and reduce aflatoxin contamination.
This breeding program is used because, the Aflatoxin contamination costs the U.S. peanut industry over $20 million annually. The development of peanut that are resistance to aflatoxin contamination would reduce these costs. Techniques have been developed that can measure genetic differences in aflatoxin contamination and they have been used to identify accessions that exhibited relatively low PAC (preharvest aflatoxin contamination) in multiple environments. Significant reductions in PAC have been identified in peanut genotypes with drought tolerance. These sources of resistance to PAC have been crossed with cultivars and breeding lines that have high yield, acceptable grade, and resistance to spotted wilt caused by Tomato spotted wilt tospovirus.
As mentioned in another blog, global warming is a problem. It is getting warmer and warmer and there will be more draught. With this breeding program, the draught will have less effect on the peanut plant.


This was my last post. Thank you for reading. Bye!



woensdag 13 januari 2016

Hello,

The peanut plant is a C3 plant. There are thousands of different types of plants, but only three different ways in which they can under go photosynthesis, or taking carbon dioxide from the air, water from their roots and sunlight and transforming it into sugar and oxygen.These different types are C3, C4 and CAM. 
C3 plants are the most common and the most efficient at photosynthesis in cool, wet climates. They keep their stomata open during the day.
By making use of photosynthesis the plant can fixate nitrogen.
The most imporant source of Biological Nitrogen Fixation is the symbiotic interaction between soil bacteriia and legume plants, including many crops that are important to humans. The NH3 resulting from fixation can be transported into plant tissue and incoporated into amino acids, which are then made into plant proteins. Peanut plants contain high levels of protein and are among the most important agricultural sources of protein in the world. Peanuts are able to interact symbiotically with soil bacteria that fix nitrogen.
The picture shows the nitrogen cycle. It tells how nitrogen fixate and what is needed for that.

Not only can peanut plants fixate nitrogen, but they are also indeterminate in both vegetative and reproductive development. This means that the plant in producing new leaves and stems at the same time that it is flowering, pegging and developing pods. Consequently, developing pods compete with vegetative components for carbohydrates and nutrients.

However, all the process will be more difficult with flobal warming. Researches found out that that global warming could dramatically reduce peanut production in places where temperatures are already high. In the USA, the themperature can already be really high right now.
If the temperature rises, the peanut production will start moving northward towards more temperate regions. However, if the temperature is too high for the peanut plant, the yield dropps by about 6% per degree of increase.
More CO2 in the air will not be benificial for the production; the crop will grow big and green, but will not produce seeds at all.
Not only the temperature and CO2 will be a problem, but also rain. Peanut plants are rain-fed, if global warming also leads to drought in these areas, yield could be even lower. 

maandag 11 januari 2016

Hi,

As I mentioned before, peanut plants are annual. However, there are also perrenial varieties available. Annual peanuts are ready to harvest about 120 to 140 days after planting.
Both of the varieties need at least 6 hours of sun each day.

Snapshot: planting peanuts
This part will give some facts about the perfect conditions of the peanut plant.
Planting depth: about 7.5 to 12.5 cm
Spacing in rows: about 18 cm
Germination soil temperature: 15.5 to 21 degrees C
Days to germination: 10 to 14 days
Preferred soil PH: 5.5 to 7.0
Growing soil temperature: 18 to 29 degrees C

Snapshot: Storing peanuts & freezing peanuts
Storage temperatue: 10 to 15.5 degrees C
Humidity: 60 to 65% relative humidity
Storage life (unfrozen in above conditions): 2 months
Storage life (frozen): 3 years
Seed longevity: about 3 years

Some plants can be planted next to each other to help each other out. In some cases it can help to keep the nitrogen level good, but it can also be for the support of the plant.
Peanut plant can be planted next to these other companion plants:
- Beets, - Cabbage family, - Carrots, - Celeriac, - Celery, - Corn, - Cucumbers, - Eggplant, - Lettuce, - Marigold, - Pea, - Potato, - Radish, - Rosemary, - Strawberry, - Savory, - Tansy.
Some plants do not have an adventage if you plant them next to each other. The peanut plant should avoid: - Basil, - Fennel, - Kohlrabi and the - Onion.


zondag 10 januari 2016

Hello,

The Peanut plant is a dicot plant. 

The picture above shows and explains why the peanut plant is a dicot. It shows when a plant is dicot and how you can see that.   



All dicot plants have a taproot root system. 
In the case of a peanut plant, it is a bit harder to see. This is because of the fact that the fruits of the plant are grown under the ground. Because of this, the roots look a bit messier, 
The plant has a taproot system, below the big taproots there are smaller roots. 

This picture also shows the anatomy of the plant and how the plant looks like. The plant is around 60 cm tall and is a annual plant. This means that the plant completes its life cycle in one year. 
The peanut plant has an ‘indeterminate’ flowering habit, meaning that it continues flowering over its entire vegetative life cycle of over 100 days. 
The most important and special part of the peanut plant is that the fruits grow under the ground as you can see. 
This is special, because almost all fruits grow above the ground.


After the fruits are picked from the plant and the plant dies. You just need a peanut, take it out of the shelf and put it in the ground and a new plant can grow again.