Peanut Butter Shortage

This will come as very bad news for a lot of you. Stock up now!


http://www.accuweather.com/blogs/news/story/56325/peanut-butter-problem-1.asp

Take a good, long look at that jar of peanut butter sitting on your kitchen table. It's going to have to last you a while.

The United States has a peanut shortage this fall and soon peanut butter prices will jump around 30 percent.

Drought was the main obstacle for peanut growers this year.

Tiffany Arthur, an agricultural economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Farm Service Agency, said that in Texas, the air was so dry that irrigation water would evaporate before the water could reach the plants. The Texas peanut yield is down 17 percent.

Though not as bad as Texas, dry weather affected farmers in the state with the nation's biggest peanut crop, Georgia.

"I've never seen a year wherein we suffered from planting time, all the way through the growing season," said Hawkinsville, Ga., farmer Rodney Dawson. "I've never experienced a season like this in 41 years."

The dirt "is just hard, really hard. [It's] just like powder, no moisture at all," Dawson said.

"The La Nina is mostly to be blamed here," AccuWeather.com Agricultural Meteorologist Dale Mohler said. "That southern tier of the country where peanuts are grown is typically dry during a La Nina."

La Nina stifles the storm track in the Southern states. There isn't the normal progression of storms. Instead, high pressure systems kill off any moisture and storms.

Worse, the bad news isn't over for the peanut farmers or peanut lovers, Mohler said.

"With La Nina coming back this fall, we're expecting another dry winter and spring in the Southern states and that's more bad news for crops in the South, including peanuts. If summer rains don't materialize [in 2012], that's two bad years in a row."

Another part of the problem is that cotton prices were high around planting time, so farmers planted cotton instead of peanuts. Planted acres for peanuts went down 11 percent this year.

The last time farmers planted so few acres of peanuts was 2009. Before that, it's been nearly a hundred years since so few acres of peanuts were planted, 1915.