PERFECT PEANUTS: Farmers celebrate bumper season

G CRUMPTON and Sons have had their most successful peanut crop ever after what has been a nearly perfect season.

Darryn Crumpton inspecting his next peanut crop. Picture: Madeline Grace

G CRUMPTON and Sons have had their most successful peanut crop ever after what has been a nearly perfect season.

Darryn Crumpton is in the third generation of Crumptons working the South Burnett land to yield peanut crops .

Mr Crumpton has been working on this particular peanut variety for the last seven years.

"It's honestly the best peanut crop I've ever had. I mean you've just got to look at it. It's overflowing with peanuts. Usually you've just got the peanuts in the very middle of the crop. But on this one it's everywhere and covering the whole thing. It completely weighs it down," Mr Crumpton said.

"Since it's been about seven years in the making it's so great that it's done this well in it's first commercial grow.

"Last season I just finished breeding it and trialling it. So this season I can actually produce it commercially for the first time."

Mr Crumpton has named this new peanut variety Wooroolin after his favourite pub.

He said this harvest has been worth the wait.

"The whole things takes years. You can only grow them once a year. And you've got to do this like four times to get accurate data. Then with that accurate data you've actually got to run some trials to get the very best peanut variety you can," Mr Crumpton said.

"So that's why I'm so excited about this crop. There's going to be an estimated 14000 tonnes of peanuts. Now last year with a different peanut variety we only had 9000. So that's a big difference.

"This season we had just the right amount of rain and at just the right time."

Mr Crumpton said this season the weather was near perfect.

"I've been in peanuts all my life so I can tell that this lot is something else. It's honestly pretty impressive," Mr Crumpton said.

"Our later peanuts are looking really really good too. But we could do with just a bit more rain to finish them off.

"Whereas for this one we just had rain. So at the same time we don't want rain in the next few days while we're harvesting this crop."

More rain would have the potential to damage this crop.

"Since it's our best one we really don't want it to be effected by more rain," Mr Crumpton said.

"What we've been doing is pulling them out of the ground. If it doesn't rain the thrashing should be going ahead by Wednesday. Then it'll be all right to go ahead for the first harvest. Because you want them to dry out before you can harvest them.

"It's been good this season because it's ended with a cooler finish which is also what you want. It stops diseases and the chance of other stuff going wrong and everything being downgraded. You don't want it to be too cool, but you don't want it to finish too hot either. See like that heat wave that ended our season last year was no good. But this time the season has been perfect."

The Crumpton's peanuts will be harvested and processed here in the South Burnett before being sent down South to be flavoured and distributed across Australia.

"You just can't ask for much more than this," Mr Crumpton said.

"We've had all this rain, sunny days, and then a cooler finish to the season. It's pretty perfect."