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For Jimmy Carter, the road to national political pre-eminence has been paved with peanuts. The Carter family’s peanut farming and warehousing operation has provided the all-but-certain Democratic nominee with the money and time to pursue his phenomenally successful political career. At the same time, Carter’s name has drawn more attention than any other—with the arguable exceptions of Planters and Skippy—to the peanut industry. It is big, modern and thriving as never before, partly at public expense.

Peanuts today provide a livelihood to 60,000 farmers on 1.6 million acres scattered through such states as Texas. Alabama, North Carolina, Virginia —and above all, Georgia. The peanut plant is hardy enough not to require intense care, but it grows best in sandy soil. Georgia has that, and its farmers seem to have a natural flair for peanuts; anyway, the state produces almost 44% of the total U.S. crop.

Glass Jars. Peanut farming has become a highly mechanized business. Beginning in late April, mechanical planters insert seed peanuts into the soil. Though many city dwellers may think peanuts grow inside glass jars, they actually burgeon underground, like potatoes. Four or five months after planting, a machine called a “digger-shaker-inverter” trundles over the field cutting under the plant, lifting it from the soil, shaking off clinging dirt and placing it back on the ground to allow the peanut pods to dry partially. Finally, a peanut combine picks up the plants and separates the mature pods.

In each of the past six years, Georgia farmers have raised their yield per acre to a record (1975 figure: 3,320 lbs.). The total U.S. crop last year was almost 4 billion lbs., up nearly a billion pounds from 1970. About 40% of the crop that is used for food is made into peanut,butter; the rest is divided among candy bars, snacks or cooking oil. Some peanuts are even crushed into feed for pigs.

Campaign Issue. Carter’s operation is about average-sized. On 241 acres, he grows seed peanuts, all of which are sold to other farmers. His warehousing business buys peanuts from other farmers for sale to manufacturers. Nonetheless, Carter’s business has become a potential campaign issue. The reason: an anachronistic price-support program that insulates peanut farmers from market risks and enables them to profit at the expense of the public purse.

Carter does not directly participate in the price-support program: the only Government check related to peanuts that his family received last year was $700 for storage fees. Indirectly, though, his business benefits from the general largesse scattered among peanut farmers by the fact that peanuts are the last food crop still under price supports —and Republicans, prominently including Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz. have threatened to make that a talking point in the campaign.

Government help has two aspects. First, import controls effectively bar processors from buying peanuts from such other countries as India and Brazil. More important, farmers can legally grow peanuts only on Government-set acreage allotments—and any peanuts that processors do not want to buy can, in effect, be sold to the Government at artificially high prices. This year’s support price, scheduled to be announced next month, is expected to go as high as $415 a ton, v. a world price of $250. Each year the Government buys up huge amounts of peanuts; last year it purchased about 30% of the entire crop. This crop year, the Government’s support operation has cost taxpayers $200 million directly, plus many millions more in high prices for peanut products (the average retail price of a 12-oz. jar of peanut butter jumped from 54.7¢ in 1973 to 70.4¢ in 1975).

Butz and others have been pressing to plow under the peanut program. To head off that eventuality, Representative Dawson Mathis of Georgia has recently introduced a compromise bill that would reduce acreage allotments by 22.5% and pare support prices slightly. The showdown could come next year when Congress votes on a new general agriculture bill. If the nation’s best-known peanut farmer—who has indicated that he favors lower price supports —is then occupying the White House, it will be interesting to see what recommendations come from the Oval Office.

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