Sunflower Highlights

Post Date: Jun 29 2020

Crop Progress

Minnesota reports 72% of the sunflower crop is in good to excellent condition. In North Dakota, 56% is reported good to excellent, while 83% of the crop there is emerged. Planting is wrapping up in all reporting states, and harvest continues in Texas.

Crop Progress - Monday, June 29, 2020

State	This Week	Last Week	Last Year	5 Year Average
North Dakota
Planted	93	89	97	99
Emerged	83	64	86	91
South Dakota
Planted	98	90	90	91
Kansas
Planted	88	78	81	84
Colorado
Planted	94	86	82	86
Texas
Planted	NA	77	NA	NA
Harvested	NA	3	NA	NA

Crop Conditions - Monday, June 29, 2020

State	Very Poor	Poor	Fair	Good	Excellent
North Dakota	1	5	38	83	3
Minnesota	2	4	22	67	5
Colorado	3	12	41	43	1

Grower reports

Texas has sunflower field at all different stages: in southern Texas, harvest is nearly half finished; sunflower in central Texas are at petal drop stage; and in the Lubbock area, some acres are just now being planted. Mike Williams with Red River says of the harvested sunflower so far, yields are about average. Texas has been dry, just like much of North Dakota, where Tioga area producer TJ Halverson says they need rain desperately. Halverson says planting was late and winds have been brutal for the past several weeks. Still he says his nearly 1,400 acres of both confection and high oleic sunflower are holding on.

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Markets

The sunflower market is heating up in the Dakotas as birdfood and crushers compete for remaining old crop seed stocks. In the past two weeks birdfood prices at some locations are up $2.00-$2.50 per cwt. with prices trading at $22.50-$24.25 in North Dakota and upwards of $25.00 in South Dakota. This week at the North Dakota crush plants nearby NuSun prices increased 45 to 50 cents with high oleic increasing 30 to 50 cents. The July contract at the crush plants added 50 to 95 cents as well. Seed prices in the High Plains were unchanged this week. On Tuesday, USDA will release its latest planted acres report. Traders are anxious to confirm thoughts of soybean acres showing an increase from the March planting intentions report. Some in the trade think total planted U.S. soybean acres could be a bit north of 85 million this year. Corn acres are expected to show a decrease from the March report as difficult planting conditions in some areas had producers switching from corn to other crops with some acres going to prevent plant being too wet to plant. The trade expects sunflower acres to show an increase from 2019. In the March intentions report producers indicated they planned to increase oil acres by 13% with confection acres up 32% from last year. In the past week, producers planted an additional 90,000 acres pushing 2020 planted acres to about 1,394,000 acres. This represents 95% of this year’s projected planted acres.