Peanuts - For Jesse

A couple of months ago my brother called and asked me how peanuts grew: from a tree, a bush, the ground?  I told him they grew in the ground and that in my village they were widely grown.  I also promised to post a blog post dedicated solely to peanuts.  This is it:

Two of my neighbors shelling their groundnuts for the day.  The peanuts are dug out of the soil, separated from the roots, taken home, dried under the sun, and then shelled by hand.  Interestingly, crops in Zambia can be divided into gender-specific crops.  Maize, cotton, and other cash crops are thought of as male crops... men are responsible for them.  While beans and peanuts are female crops and the women are in charge of them.

It is thought that peanuts (ground nuts as they're called here) were probably first domesticated in South America a long, long time ago.  Specifically in what is now modern-day Paraguay.  The seeds are planted here in Zambia sometime around the middle of December (late November at the earliest) and harvested in March.  Like other crops there are a lot of different varieties with a wide array of traits that a farmer can choose from.

The actual nut grows in the ground, attached to the root.  One plant can have over 20 ground nuts attached, easily.

The basic thing to know about peanuts is that they're legumes, which means they fix nitrogen into the soil. This is important for crop farmers, like in the US and in Zambia, who grow nutrient hungry crops like corn/maize or cotton.  Practicing crop rotation in which beans or peanuts follow a crop like corn will help to preserve the soil over time as the peanuts will replace the nutrients that the corn has so readily consumed.

Because of it's labor issues, peanut harvesting often involves the entire family.  Typically men will help with digging the crop up, but the rest is reserved for the women and children.  The whole family - minus the father - is involved in the harvest, with shelling taking the most amount of time.

In the village, peanuts are great for nutrition (high in protein) and can be used as a cash crop.  Due to our proximity to Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo - both countries have a hard time growing enough food for their populations - farmers in my area can easily sell surplus peanuts to traders that come through the area.  The traders buy the peanuts take them across the border to the respective countries and sell them in the markets for Angolans and Congolese to buy.  

Myself and Mr. Nshimbi in his peanut field.  Rains were good this year and he had an excellent harvest with some peanut shells as big as my thumb.

Peanuts are labor-intensive though.  Shelling the peanuts is all done by hand and although they can be sold to the traders as un-shelled the price is considerably lower, so farmers shell the peanuts and will typically receive a higher price for their efforts.  

That's a brief overview of peanuts, Jesse.  I hope you learned something.