Breeding Peanuts for Multiple Disease Resistance

This is the project from which four of our last five cultivar releases came: Bailey in 2008, Sugg in 2009, and high-oleic cultivars Sullivan and Wynne in the spring of 2013. Foundation seed of those two releases was grown in 2013, but because there is a lag in availability of seed following release, necessary to allow for multiplication of seed to a commercial scale in the North Carolina seed chain, they will not be widely available until the spring of 2017. The Bailey and Sugg cultivars were released in 2008 and 2009, and the 2012 season was the first in which that seed became widely available to growers. Using the 2015 certified seed production as estimates of cultivar use in 2016, North Carolina releases were grown on 94% of peanut acreage in North Carolina and 87% of acreage in the VC area. Approximately 81% of the acreage in-state and 74% region-wide were in Bailey and Sugg. An estimate of the difference in crop value achieved by the new releases, using value-per-acre figures at the loan rate taken from the PVQE program, is $10 million region-wide. Such estimation requires a lot of assumptions, but even if the estimate is inflated twofold, the improvement would still be $5 million in a single year.