Sunflower Highlights

Post Date: May 30 2023

Crop Progress - Tuesday, May 30, 2023

State	This Week	Last Week	Last Year	5 Year Average
North Dakota
Planted	30	5	19	33
Emerged	NA	NA	NA	11
South Dakota
Planted	28	3	21	19
Kansas
Planted	6	3	12	18
Minnesota
Planted	66	29	6	59
Colorado
Planted	25	15	11	15

ND Sunflower Map Campaign Wins Award

The North Dakota Sunflower Map Campaign was selected as the recipient of the Amplifier Award for Marketing Excellence, one of the annual ND Governor’s Awards for Travel and Tourism. The North Dakota Sunflower Map is a partnership between North Dakota Tourism and the National Sunflower Association. Farmers across the state share their sunflower fields with visitors, and the map provides exact coordinates and updates on bloom stages. The campaign's success led to adding branded sunflower seed mailboxes, and in 2022, it reached over 220,000 people on social and generated over 15,000 website visits in a month. The campaign also garnered 356 media instances and a total reach of 241 million in readership.

Summer Seminar Session to Address Farm Bill Progress

The current Farm Bill expires at the end of September 2023. There are a lot of political and budgetary hurdles to navigate to get a new Farm Bill across the finish line this year. Tom Hance, Gordley Associates will talk about the key issues for the Farm Bill overall, the Title I Farm Programs and the top priorities for sunflower producers at the NSA Summer Seminar.

Markets

Old crop sunflower prices are down 90 cents to $1.10, with new crop down 60 to 90 cents at the crush plants this week. Sunflower planting continues in all states and is ahead of last year and equal to or ahead of the five-year averages in Colorado, Minnesota, North and South Dakota. Kansas is slightly behind last year at this same time and the five-year average planting pace. In the past week, producers made excellent progress and planted an additional 312,200 acres pushing 2023 planted acres to about 393,600 acres. This represents 30% of this year’s projected planted acres and is slightly ahead of the five-year average of 25%. Last year at this same time only 19% of total projected acres were planted. Drier and warmer than normal weather conditions are forecast for the Dakotas and Minnesota and should allow for good planting progress in the week ahead. According to USDA’s May Oil Crops Outlook report, U.S. production of sunflower seed in 2023/24 is expected to fall as acreage intentions are down 20 percent. USDA estimates 1.3 million acres of sunflower will be harvested, producing 2.29 billion pounds of seed. Although there are higher beginning seed stocks, supply is projected 444 million pounds lower at just over 3.01 billion pounds. The reduced supply of seed is expected to impact crush volume bird food supplies in the 2023/24 marketing year. Global sunflower production in 2023/24 is forecast to increase 6 percent from the previous year to 54.3 MMT.

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