This year is likely to be a poor year for sunflower acreage in Manitoba.
It’s not because prices are bad, but because farmers in the last couple of years have been ravaged by sclerotinia. People expect acres to drop by about 20 percent.
Manitoba is a world leading exporter and producer of confectionary sunflowers. Manitoba and Argentina dominate world trade. That sounds impressive, but that’s only because confec sunflowers are a tiny crop. Oilseed sunflowers are the big world crop, and we don’t grow many of them.
Here is Jay Schuler, a pioneer North American sunflower breeder, summing up the situation at the Manitoba Special Crops Symposium this morning:
“In confecs, Canada is very important, but for oil sunflowers Canada is a non-factor.”
The good thing about that is that Schuler, whose family was one of the first American families to grow sunflowers (using Canadian seed!), thinks confecs have a fabulous future. Oilseed sunflowers face a real challenge from other oilseed crops, especially ones that are genetically modified and see leaping productivity gains, something sunflowers won’t get.
Confecs have a great future, he thinks, because as a human snack food, and a super-healthy snack food, consumers around the world will lots for the seeds and not even think about it. Yesterday, in a different presentation, he said that confecs will probably continue to move west across and out of the Red River valley as soybeans and corn move into those areas, but that confecs will need to buy acreage with higher prices.
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I interviewed him about this afterwards, and he said he thinks that will happen, because there really is no realistic limit to how high a price consumers will pay for confecs as snacks. He pointed out to me that macadamia nuts are selling for eight dollars per pound – wholesale – and that pistachios and many other nuts and seeds have seen their prices double and triple – and people keep buying them. Confecs will stay a popular snack, he’s sure.
But in general sunflowers are facing an onslaught of GM crops that farmers love to grow – partly because they are so easy to manage – and with sclerotinia becoming a problem in many wet areas, the sunflower industry is having trouble hanging on to farmers hearts and acres.
There’s no quick way to catch up to or even keep pace with GM crops, he said. Sunflowers are unlikely to ever go GM because they are native North American plants that have many, many wild varieties everywhere, and if GM herbicide tolerance crossed out into a big, wild reservoir farmers would be facing a nightmare.
So prices will have to go up, generally, over time to match the yield gains of crops like canola, corn, soybeans and everything else that are chasing the yellow-headed crop west. And breeders will need to develop varieties that are better able to fight off sclerotinia, and companies will need to develop treatments to hit the disease from the other side.
