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!