Sunflower Highlights
Post Date: Oct 05 2020
Crop Progress
Harvest is slightly ahead of average in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota. Minnesota reports 24% of the crop harvested; North Dakota 16 % and South Dakota reports 6% harvested.
Crop Progress - Monday, October 5, 2020
State This Week Last Week Last Year 5 Year Average
North Dakota        
Bracts Yellow 94 87 84 93
Mature 80 47 48 73
Harvested 16 6 --- 5
South Dakota        
Harvested 6 2 --- 3
Minnesota        
Harvested 24 7 0 14
Texas        
Harvested NA 64 71 66
Crop Conditions - Monday, October 5, 2020
State Very Poor Poor Fair Good Excellent
North Dakota 3 12 31 49 5
Minnesota 3 4 14 72 7
Colorado 3 15 72 10 0
Grower report
Bismarck, ND area producer Clark Coleman hopes to start harvesting sunflower this week. That’s a little ahead of schedule, but he says his sunflower look good. Coleman has about 2,700 acres of sunflower to harvest. Most of those are high oleic sunflower, with about 700 acres of confection.
Call for papers
Here’s your chance to be a part of the National Sunflower Association’s Research Forum. We’re looking for research papers to be presented at the Forum, which will be held virtually via Zoom on January 13-14, 2021. Presentations may be either oral or in the form of a poster. A time will be designated for authors to present their posters and answer questions. Each oral presentation will be limited to 10-12 minutes with 2-3 minutes allowed for questions. If you are interested in presenting at the Forum, submit your application on our website, click here. You do not have to submit the actual paper or poster at this time, just the information indicated online and the author information. Submissions must be completed by November 13, 2020. If you plan to attend, registration will be open on our website soon.
Markets
Nearby prices at the crush plants were unchanged to up 15 cents last week. Sunflower harvest has started in the Dakotas and Minnesota. In Texas, harvest continues to move along ahead of the five-year average. In the past week, producers harvested an additional 115,000 acres pushing 2020 harvested acres to about 207,000 acres. This represents 14% of this year’s projected harvested acres and is significantly ahead of the five-year average of 3%. Harvest progress is about two to four weeks ahead of last year at this same time. Overall dry conditions are expected to continue the next two weeks in the sunflower growing region and will benefit ongoing harvest. Last week USDA released its latest grain stocks report. Old crop sunflower stocks in all positions on September 1, 2020 totaled 213 million pounds, down 26 percent from a year ago. All stocks stored on farms totaled 22.5 million pounds and off-farm stocks totaled 190 million pounds. Stocks of oil type sunflower seed are 158 million pounds down 27% from a year ago; of this total, 13.9 million pounds are on-farm stocks and 144 million pounds are off-farm stocks. Non-oil sunflower stocks totaled 54.4 million pounds down 23% from a year ago, with 8.62 million pounds stored on the farm and 45.8 million pounds stored off the farm. On October 9, USDA will give its first estimate of 2020 US harvested sunflower acres and total seed production.
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