Peanut farmers sidelined this baseball season as COVID-19 keeps fans at home

With the coronavirus keeping baseball stadiums closed to fans — well, except for those creepy cutouts — peanut farmers are also left outside looking in..

No fans means no demand for the salty sports snack that’s a staple at sports stadiums, KXAN reported on Friday.

Farmers like Mason Becker, who grows Virginia peanuts,, say the impact may not hurt farmers right off the bat, but the market’s instability could present problems moving forward.

“Any time you take a considerable amount of the consumption off of the market, it will have an impact for sure,” Becker, of the Western Peanut Growers Association, said to KXAN.

Because fans are watching on TV and not in person, 5.5 million bags of in-shell peanuts are just sitting in storage, a representative from the Texas Farm Bureau tells KXAN.

“Texas peanut farmers count on that market every year,” Gary Joiner, Texas Farm Bureau communications director, said according to KXAN.

“Growers always want competition, always want bidders for the crops that they’re growing,” Joiner said. “And when you lose some traditional buyers every year, or in a one-year instance, like we are right now, sometimes it’s difficult to find where suitable homes are for those peanuts that are being grown.”

“Texas growers know the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Joiner said. “I think they understand and respect the decision of the ballparks being closed. They’re going to make adjustments they’re going to try and find other uses for peanuts that would normally be in those ballparks.”

Back in late June, the New York Times reported that the pandemic had baseball teams canceling orders from already-paid farmers who had harvested the peanuts in October 2019 for the 2020 season.

“We are basically left holding the peanuts,” Tom Nolan, the vice president of sales and marketing for Hampton Farms, told the Times.

Dan Ward, a farmer in Clarkton, North Carolina, told the Times he sold the crop he had harvested back in March when the country began shutting down. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t affected by the pandemic. The Times said that Ward had to “calculate how many ballpark peanuts to plant in May for the 2021 season.”

So are all the peanuts just sitting around?

Not exactly, according to the Texas Farm Bureau. Farmers are calling in a pitch-hitter in the form of peanut butter. Grocery stores have been cleaning up thanks to a 75% spike in sales back in March, according to the Bureau.

“Kids are home and out of school, and they’re eating a lot more meals at home, and peanut butter is something kids love,” Patrick Archer, CEO of the American Peanut Council, said in an interview with ‘Agri-Pulse’, as reported by the Farm Bureau. “Our industry has been making peanut butter as fast as possible. All of our companies are running at full capacity to meet all of the demand.”