In the peanut industry, rapid methods and sensors for moisture determination are essential in minimizing aflatoxin risk during storage, maintaining kernel quality and improving profitability for peanut growers. Currently, peanut grading is a labor-intensive process during which inspectors determine several quality attributes including meat content, size of pods, damaged kernels, foreign material, and kernel moisture content. At peanut buying stations, it is only after sorting, cleaning, and shelling that kernel moisture content is determined and a decision is made whether the peanut lot meets
the standard value for sale (10.49% or less, in the U.S.). It would be advantageous to determine kernel moisture content while the kernels are still in the pods at the beginning of the grading process. Recently, a method for in-shell kernel moisture determination was proposed [14]. The method enabled the determination of peanut pod bulk density, peanut pod moisture content, and peanut kernel moisture content from measurement of the dielectric properties of the pods at a single microwave frequency. For in-shell peanuts, a relationship between the peanut pod density-independent calibration function (p) and the peanut kernel density-independent calibration function (k) enabled the expression of kernel moisture content in terms of the dielectric properties of peanut pods.