by Calhoun County Extension Agent Daniel Leonard
In the agriculture world, you always hear the word “average”. What is a crop’s average yield? What is our average annual rainfall? What is the average disease load we can expect? But what you never hear is what goes into all that data to compute that magical average year. The answer – a bunch of very unique cropping years combine to form that one average year. 2025 certainly hasn’t been average and continues to be very much its own animal.
Let’s consider the unusual circumstances 2025 has brought farmers. First, and in hindsight, a harbinger of strange events to come, a state record snowfall arrived in late January. Then, below cost of production cotton prices forced fewer cotton acres and increased corn acres (especially risky unirrigated acres) to amounts Calhoun County hasn’t seen in decades. Then, for the first time in 10 years, no hurricanes made landfall in the U.S., which might sound good but leads us to our next unique occurrence – late summer drought. The second half of the cropping season (August-October) was extremely dry with no tropical systems to save us; September was one of the driest on record, October wasn’t too far behind, and as of this writing, we’ve received no rainy relief in November. If there was a silver lining to the prolonged dry conditions, it’s that disease incidence was lower this year than in years past. It’s not much but we’ll take what we can get.
So, with all those factors working against growers, particularly the extreme late season drought, the great- looking peanut crop that had begun to set in July and early August failed to reach its potential and turned a big harvest into a much more modest one. In a normal year,
a modest peanut crop might be overcome by an excellent cotton or corn crop. However, between the dismal price of cotton and the inherent riskiness of unirrigated corn (low-lying fields and/or fields that caught sporadic late May-June showers did well, those that didn’t suffered), and ever rising land rental rates, growers simply can’t tolerate a less than excellent peanut season. It all adds up to form an uncertain economic situation for farmers going forward.
I hate to sound overly pessimistic, but next season growers will again be faced with the decision of whether to choose “Door A” and disrupt their rotation by planting peanuts behind peanuts in an attempt to maximize return, “Door B” and gamble on corn as a rotation partner, or “Door C” and keep their normal rotation but lose money on cotton (unless something serious changes in the cotton futures markets between now and next planting season). In our “average” or “normal” year spoken of earlier, there might even be some federal relief for farmers to fall back on to help ensure a stable national food and fiber supply. However, as of this writing, both houses of Congress remain with heels dug in refusing to pass a package to fund the government, leaving USDA closed for business and the federal safety net closed for the time being.
While the future of row crop agriculture in Calhoun County is anything but certain, what is certain is the perseverance of our agricultural community to get through challenging times. As harvest season comes to a close, be grateful for American farmers and their continued willingness to take risks and work hard to ensure that we all have access to the safest, most reliable, and most affordable supply of food and fiber in the world.
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