PRIMARY PRODUCTION

In Argentina, groundnuts are planted in October-November, and harvested in March, April, May. Since the very beginning of peanut farming cycle --preparation of soils and seed selection--, Good Agricultural Practices are applied. Cordoba Peanuts [1] are grown within a frame of sustainable production that includes adequate rotations according to studies by INTA (Federal Institute for Agricultural Technology). Agronomic treatments are implemented after a careful evaluation of soils, area microclimate and lot history of previous crops.

Conservation systems used in Argentine peanut production are currently exhibited as models of sustainability in foreign universities and agricultural organizations.

The Argentine peanut growers are highly specialized and super professional farmers. Their expertise is well known in every country where peanuts are cultivated. This leguminosae (usually included in the “nut” chapter) is a crop with very particular biological and agronomic characteristics. Also, its production costs are significantly more expensive than those of other crops. In our country, there are around 1,600 peanut farmers; most of them come from traditional peanut producing families that have been growing peanuts for three generations.

In the years '60s, some 700,000 Hectares were planted with groundnuts in the province of Cordoba. Since the 80s, the brutal expansion of soybeans displaced many regional crops, including peanuts that started to be planted more and more in other provinces neighboring Cordoba. As a consequence of this displacement, groundnut planting was forced to leave its traditional area in the center of Cordoba, and go South towards a different agroecological region, even reaching the North of San Luis and La Pampa. Currently, the Argentine peanut region covers on average 250,000 Hectares in the province of Cordoba; 30,000 hectares in San Luis and La Pampa; and around 10,000 in Salta and Jujuy.

Due to the high production costs related to peanut crop, as well as its agronomical and logistics complexities, the Cluster had to adopt a new strict organizational scheme: now peanut farmers are integrated into cooperatives, with their own processing facilities and export operation, or through partnership agreements with the processing companies.