PLAINS — Riley Davis nosed his Dodge Ram pickup truck out of a sandy field where row upon row of his hundreds of acres of peanuts grow. He wheeled onto the sleepy, two-lane state highway that wriggles south of here along the Kinchafoonee Creek, half a dozen miles across the countryside from Jimmy Carter’s childhood home.
Two of Davis’ three sons, Luke, 7, and Drew, 4, squirmed in the back seat. Up front, Davis, 32, considered the history of his not-too-distant neighbor, once a fellow farmer, that soon-to-be-100-year-old former president, whose legacy will be honored at this Saturday’s Plains Peanut Festival.
For more than a century, the Davis clan has worked this land. As he headed home on a recent afternoon, he pondered whether another generation of Davises — the very ones in the cab of his truck — might find their futures tending crops of soybeans, cotton, corn and, yes, the crop synonymous with Carter.
Davis, 11 years into his chosen profession, isn’t sure.
He sometimes wonders how long he’ll make it.
“I would hate to want them to be doing it,” Davis said of his sons. “I mean, my mama doesn’t want me to be doing it right now.”
Margins are slim, the hours long, the unknowns burdensome. His livelihood lies at the mercy of oft-uncontrollable factors, among them weeds, worms, weather … wild hogs.
Early last week, Davis was already sweating out forecast talk of a looming tropical storm. If his fields are swamped by downpours, it could delay harvesting and prove costly.
“You can take the best farmer in the country,” he said, “and make no peanuts.”
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
But then there is that local allure, that century of soil and toil in his blood.
Some days, as he tends the crops he grows west of Plains, he cruises past Carter’s boyhood farm. Though the Carter land is no longer devoted to peanut production — there’s a solar farm on part of it now — the heritage persists.
“There is,” Davis said, “something about the interest in peanuts here. And maybe it’s because of Jimmy Carter and the legacy he has. Corn’s just corn. There’s corn everywhere.”
Peanuts are the pride and pulse of the region.
“Peanuts are what’s keeping us going,” Davis said. “I like to say nine out of 10 years, you’ll make some money on peanuts. For the most part, they’ll come out. … Right now, on cotton and corn we’re losing money. We’re taking peanuts and we’re trying to offset the loss of cotton and corn.”
While peaches may be Georgia’s pride and joy, peanuts are its million-dollar smile. About 52% of the country’s peanuts come from here. This year, Georgia farmers planted about 10% more acres of peanuts than they did last year.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Better irrigated southwest Georgia — an expanse farther down the Flint River basin toward the Florida line — produces the bulk of the state’s peanut crop, but greater Plains is Georgia’s sentimental ground zero for goobers.
Davis graduated from Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College about a decade ago with a degree in diversified agriculture.
He talks in a low, lyric drawl.
He is fond of his roots.
“I go away from here and the first thing somebody says is, ‘You’re not from here.’ ‘Well, no, I’m not.’ I know I’ve got an accent,” he said.
He’s also fond of his work, despite the challenges.
“We get to talking and I say, ‘I’m a farmer.’ For some reason, there’s something about farmers. Everybody’s interested. It kind of gives me some pride. I’m proud to do what I do. I’m proud to work hard and to feed America. I don’t see there being a more rewarding occupation.”
‘Rural America is still important’
In a University of Georgia research field on the outskirts of Plains one recent morning, dozens of visitors with peanut-agriculture interests from around the country and the world gathered for a showcasing of the state’s peanut industry.
The annual peanut tour, as it is known, crisscrosses the area and highlights advancements in everything from planting to harvesting the beloved legumes.
Among those on hand was a Griffin-based USDA scientist and plant geneticist who was born in India.
Shyam Tallury oversees a gene bank that preserves peanut materials from around the globe. He recalls being in college in 1976 when Carter was elected president. Tallury, then in his late teens, was well into his study of peanuts, or “groundnuts” as they are known in his native land.
When Carter won the White House, Tallury and his classmates rejoiced.
“The whole campus, the faculty, everybody was so excited, because a peanut farmer, a groundnut farmer, became the president of the greatest country,” Tallury said.
It was, for him and others there, inspirational.
“I could never imagine that in India in those days,” he said, “a farmer becoming the president or the prime minister.”
Tallury was at the Plains Peanut Festival in recent years. He met Carter, got his autograph and shook hands with the former governor and commander in chief.
“I told him, ‘Mr. President, I’m the peanut curator,’” Tallury recalled. “He was very proud.”
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Another scientist at this year’s peanut summit, the state’s extension peanut agronomist, Scott Monfort, a UGA professor, said it is almost impossible to overstate Carter’s influence on Georgia’s peanut industry.
Monfort described Carter as “an ambassador for peanuts,” “a common man,” one who brought peanuts into the limelight.
There is no denying the peanut connections in Plains, where they serve a Carter favorite, peanut butter ice cream, at Bobby Salter’s Plains Peanuts and General Store. Or the smiling, 12-foot-tall peanut statue just down Buena Vista Road from Carter’s church, Maranatha Baptist.
Visitors flock to Plains, population 557, for a sense of the small-town ideal. Places like this hearken back to a seemingly bygone time, a realm of hardworking but easygoing folks, a place not unlike somewhere the tourists may have lived or spent time in.
A past president still living here doesn’t hurt its back-roads bona fides. Monfort said Carter has come to symbolize the notion “that rural America is still important. That life is not all in the cities, that it is still here.”
The annual peanut tour also featured an agribusinessman known to some as “Mr. Peanut.”
Tyron Spearman attends peanut festivals and serves up hot-grilled peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. They are a delicacy that, if you’ve not heard of or tasted, Spearman is “so sorry you have missed.”
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Spearman, 79, is also the executive director for the National Peanut Buying Points Association. The organization, a liaison between farmers and shellers, represents hundreds of American peanut-purchasing locations that receive and weigh and inspect the nuts.
“A lot of new commodities have to work at teaching who they are. But that’s not the case in peanuts. When we mention Jimmy Carter, the first thing we talk about is peanuts,” Spearman said. “Carter wanted to find a place to store his peanut seed when he was starting up, and he started the Southern Peanut Warehouseman’s Association. And he was the first president. And then it was changed to the Peanut Buying Points Association, and it’s still going today. He’s been very much involved in the leadership of the whole industry along the way.”
Spearman recalled Carter showing up at an association meeting and telling everyone he was going to run for governor.
“Everybody said, ‘Are you crazy?’ And then he came back to a later meeting and said, ‘I’m gonna run for president.’ Everybody couldn’t believe it,” Spearman said. “They were proud of him.”
‘A simple, honest life’
In rolling farmland between Columbus and Albany, where Terrell, Webster and Sumter counties meet, Riley Davis raises between 1,200 and 1,800 acres of peanuts a year.
Since before he can remember, Davis squeezed onto farm equipment with his father, Glenn, to survey the family’s fields. He was driving a tractor alone by the time he was 10, mowing cornstalks — an unnecessary task, but an invaluable method to learn the machinery.
There never was a question what he would grow up to do.
But his mother, Carole, insisted, “You will go to college.”
And he did, earning that degree, which exposed Davis to basic crop and plant and livestock science with a heaping side of business.
When it comes to peanuts, he and the eight or so farmhands he hires shoot for a yield of 6,000 pounds an acre.
“Am I gonna make it (this year)?” he asked. “I still don’t know.”
Some years, he has produced more, close to 7,000 pounds. Other years, he has struggled to harvest 4,000 pounds an acre.
Statewide these days, the average yield is just over 2 tons an acre, with market prices bringing about $550 per ton depending on the quality. Considering a cost of about $1,000 an acre to produce peanuts, a farmer typically has to exceed the average yield of 4,000 pounds per acre to turn much of a profit.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
On a recent afternoon at the Davis farm’s tractor shed, Riley’s mother pulled up in an SUV.
The 67-year-old mentioned how nowadays out-of-towners migrate to these parts for vacations from city life.
“They’ll buy a couple of acres and say, ‘We’re going down to the farm,’” she said.
The sentiment is quaint, but farming it ain’t.
Riley Davis smiled. “Everybody wants their own farm.”
A farm, that is, without the headaches.
People sometimes ask Davis why he keeps on farming.
The answer? “Because I can live a simple, honest life … and maybe help somebody out along the way doing it — your employees, giving people jobs.”
Sure, he harbors those doubts about the future. He worries how he’d make ends meet if farming fell through.
But, he said, “This is what I feel like I’m called to do. And I’ll say that forever.”
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