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It’s not new news to anyone who frequents the peanut butter aisle to fill their panty with one of America’s favorite food staples. The cost of peanut butter has rocketed in the last few months. We at Fill Your Plate know the story behind the story. It was a basic economics lesson of supply and demand. The prices for anything peanut rose on the supermarket shelves because demand for product was high, but the peanut supply was low.

Last fall, we told you that the J.M. Smucker Company, the makers of Jif, were planning to increase their peanut butter prices by 30%.  They expected the price increases to stay in place throughout the winter and possibly well into the spring as manufacturers were forced to pass on the sharp increases in peanut costs to their customers.

The US Department of Agriculture expected that the peanut crop would be down 13% more than it was in 2010 due to a couple of reasons– the inclimate weather and the crop shift many farmers undertook to grow a more profitable cotton crop.  Last year, growers in many states also decreased the amount of peanut acres they farmed due to the higher prices of competing commodities. The overage from the 2010 crop, which also had issues due to the drought in 2010, was expected to be depleted by early November.

Well, good news! Peanut butter prices might be easing in the coming months with the expectations of a larger peanut crop in 2012.

U.S. peanut farmers are planning to plant 1.42 million acres in 2012. That’s a 25 percent increase from the previous year according to USDA’s first planting intentions report of the season.  A record number of peanut acres will be planted in South Carolina, with 105,000 acres expected compared to the 77,000 acres planted in 2011. If forecasts for Florida and Mississippi hold true, those states will post the highest number of peanut acres farmed since 1951 and 1943, respectively.

In Florida, farmers are expected to plant 190,000 acres of peanuts, which is 12 percent more than last year; peanut acreage in Mississippi is expected to increase from 15,000 last year to a whopping 50,000 acres in 2012.

Georgia, though known as “the peach state,” grows more peanuts than any other state in the United States.  Farmers there expect to increase the amount of acres planted in 2012 by 20 percent, from 475,000 in 2011 to 570,000 acres in 2012.

In response to the higher prices for peanuts last year due to the low supply, farmers across the nation answered the cry by increasing the quantity of acres they will use to plant peanuts this year.

So, for those of you for whom peanut butter is a daily lunch making staple, take heart!  If agriculture predictions hold true, you should be able to save some of your hard earned “peanuts” this year as you fill your pantry with lower costing jars.

Related Articles:

• The Price of Peanut Butter is Going Up (fillyourplate.org)
• Fun Facts About Peanut Butter (fillyourplate.org)
• It’s National Peanut Butter Month: Go Nuts! (fillyourplate.org)