Terrell County farmer wins 2025 peanut efficiency award amid challenging year for farmers

DAWSON – Riley Davis grows peanuts, corn and soybeans on land farmed by his family since the 1920s. 

He tends to each acre like an attentive parent, cultivating the land with love, paying attention to each acre’s unique needs. In one corner, the soil is a heavy, red clay and in another, a grainy beach sand soil – both requiring different tillage and irrigation practices.

Davis’ operations earned him the 2025 Peanut Efficiency Award by the Southern Peanut Farmers, an organization made up of Alabama, Florida, Mississippi and Georgia peanut growers. The staff at the Terrell County UGA Extension Office nominated Davis for the award. Seth McAllister, the Terrell County agent, said Davis is a pioneer in the area, embracing technology and sustainable practices.

Davis said he’s proud to represent Terrell County, but in the current ag climate, winning an award feels futile. 

Davis, like most farmers, is toiling in the face of fluctuating commodity prices, rising input costs and the unpredictable impacts of climate change, causing extreme weather events. He reduced his family’s farming acreage from 5,500 to about 2,000 this year. Market prices also forced him to skip out on cotton – a crop that helped sustain his family for decades. 

“I grew peanuts efficiently and won an award for it, but that doesn’t mean I’m doing well,” he said. “It’s hard to be excited after the year I just had. I mean, I’m on the verge of losing a centennial farm.”

A centennial farm

Standing in his parents’ dining room, Davis can point across the street to land his great grandfather purchased 103 years ago. It’s known as the “home farm.” 

Davis’ childhood was intertwined with the land, completing work that he said felt like play. As he grew older, his role on the farm grew too, from pulling weeds, to scouting crops to operating the combine harvester.

After graduating from Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, Davis returned home and began working full-time on the family farm in 2014 – what Davis called a “bad time” to enter the field. 

“Folks that made money a generation ago were saving up for those years because they’ve been rough, and those were the years I was trying to build,” Davis said.

These challenges came to a head in 2018 when Hurricane Michael plowed through south Georgia. The Davis Farm was poised for a record year in cotton production, of which 90% of their acreage was growing. 

“We had just started picking it when Hurricane Michael came and destroyed it all,” Davis said. “That’s something I’ve never been able to overcome.”

Davis, normally excited to get back to work, was defeated by the time the 2019 planting season came around. 

“I had no drive, no fire under me, no nothing,” he said. “The years before that, we weren’t making tons of money, but we weren’t being knocked off our feet. Michael knocked us off our feet, and we’ve never really been able to get back up.” 

A battle to break even

In the years since, Davis said it’s been a battle just to break even. He said U.S. farmers are getting beat by other countries in exports, despite growing the highest quality crops in the world. 

“I don’t want to get political, but just like the Trump deal with China … the tariffs … everything comes back down to us,” he said. “I mean the day that the tariffs went into place a few months ago, all these markets just died.”

Davis said subsidies for farmers have all but dried up, taking away a long-time safety net for farmers. 

“There’s no cushion,” he said. “Looking at my own paper farm plan, if I’m off by 2%, I’m done. If you just get one timing issue wrong, you may lose 10% of the crop from one bat, I mean, and that’s it. There goes your little chance to break even.”

Davis said there is some hope in the recent passage of the Trump administration’s reconciliation package.

The Southern Peanut Farmers Federation pointed to parts of the bill that provide key provisions for peanut farmers.

“The budget reconciliation package provides much-needed financial relief to the peanut industry,” Georgia Peanut Commission Chairman Joe Boddiford said in a release. “The detrimental financial situation has made increasing the reference price essential to preserving the farm safety net. The legislation passed (recently) contains our industry’s top policy priorities, and we are thankful for the urgency in passing this bill.” 

Still, Davis said he’s remaining cautious that the promises aren’t “too good to be true.”

We need more farmers like Riley

In farming his 2,000 acres this year, Davis is working alone for the first time as he said economic challenges pushed his father to retire after a lifetime of ag work. This year, he’s growing 1,000 acres of corn, 850 acres of peanuts and the rest in soybeans. 

Davis said it’s his attention to detail that makes him stand out. He has an almost intuitive knowledge of the land he farms, displaying a field-by-field approach rather than blanket practices across entire crops. He said knowing each field’s history is the most important factor – a field isn’t just a field. It performs. 

“I can’t remember what I did this morning, but I can remember every field’s soil types, how they change,” he said. “You may have a field that’s 100 acres, and it may have six different soil types in it. I could draw you a map of where they go.” 

McAllister said he admires Davis’ prowess as a farmer. He’s the first in the area to use more modern technology like precision planters, spray drones and yield monitors. He’s also leading the way in using cover crops, a practice that preserves a soil’s health and controls erosion.

“He consistently makes good yields and isn’t afraid of trying techniques that are contrary to the conventional methodology to attain that goal,” McAllister said. “We need more young farmers like Riley.”

His wife, Jessie Davis, said her husband’s stewardship stands out. 

“Since he graduated college and came back to the farm, he’s been constantly trying to find ways to improve what he does so that it’s not only better for his operation, but it’s also better for the land,” Jessie Davis said. “We’re just so proud of him. It doesn’t matter if he wins awards. We’re proud of him because he’s a great husband, a great father, and a great friend. He sets out to do his best every day.”

The state of the family farm

Riley and Jessie Davis’ three sons are growing up on the same land that raised their father. 

Jessie Davis said the boys develop a unique sense of freedom, roaming the farm, learning and figuring things out for themselves. They know where their food comes from, where the clothes on their back come from.

“They ride the tractor to spray with me, we turn the music on, we have fun – safely of course,” Davis said. “They see how hard I work every day. They also see how stressed I get. I want them to see the whole picture, the long days and nights.” 

During planting season, Riley Davis often leaves before his sons awaken and returns from work after they’re getting ready for bed. 

“I like to call it single-parent season,” Jessie Davis said. “There are definitely tough times of the year, but I love the industry that we work in. People are always finding ways to get back to a farm … people relocating to rural areas. I just feel blessed that we’re already living the life that so many people wish for.”

Still, Riley Davis said he worries what his farm and the state of agriculture will look like by the time his boys are old enough to take on farming. Family farms are on the decline with a 2022 agriculture census data showing 141,733 fewer farms in 2022 than in 2017. The number of farm acres fell to 880,100,848, a loss of more than 20 million acres from just five years earlier.

“I asked my wife the other day, ‘What good has my farming done for us?’” Riley Davis said. “I’m just in a stalemate, kind of just trying to survive.”

But Jessica Davis said her husband was made to farm. She said she enjoys seeing his passion and seeing it passed on to their children.

Riley Davis said he hopes that if anything, someone might see this award he won, see his story and feel like maybe they should grow peanuts, too. 

“People ask, ‘Why the hell are you even doing this?’” Davis said. “But what else can I do right now? I love what I do. I’m gonna keep digging as hard as I can to keep going.”