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30 Years Ago

Wednesday, December 1, 2021
filed under: Historical

        Sunflower Crushing Comes to the High Plains / By Don Lilleboe — “After months of rumor and speculation, the news became official this fall: There will be an oil sunflower seed crushing facility in the High Plains.
        “National Sun Industries, which already operates a 1,500-ton-per-day crushing plant at Enderlin, N.D., announced it will open a facility near the northwestern Kansas community of Goodland. Though able to crush other soft seeds such as canola and safflower, the Goodland plant’s primary oilseed obviously will be sunflower, with its sunflower crush capacity being 500 tons of seed per day. NSI will be buying and accepting delivery of sunflower seed from the 1992 harvest and also hopes to have the plant up and running by that time.
        “The NSI plant actually will be housed in a former sugarbeet factory west of Goodland and just a few miles from the Colorado border. That mill, built by Great Western Sugar Company in 1968, closed in 1985 when Great Western went bankrupt and sugarbeets ceased to be grown in the area.
        “Why now, and why at Goodland?
        “Jeff Berkow, president of National Sun Industries, says the company has received numerous requests over the past several years to consider establishing a sunflower processing plant in the High Plains. ‘Until now, though, we’ve turned down those requests,’ he explains, ‘on the grounds that the future of sunflower was very uncertain because of the difficulty for it to compete against other crops in the farm program. With the inclusion of sunflower in the program for 1991 and on, which enables sunflower to compete on a more level playing field, we felt this was the appropriate time to look into some of the requests.’
        “Though NSI considered other High Plains communities, it settled upon Goodland for several reasons, according to Berkow. One, of course, was the existence of the former sugar mill with its solid infrastructure, including storage silos, rail access and loading areas.
        “A second reason was Goodland’s location. NSI plans to draw seeds from western Nebraska, western Kansas and eastern Colorado, and Goodland is fairly centrally located within that region. Plus, it’s a region with plenty room for more sunflower acres.”
        Editor’s Note: The Goodland plant, which has been owned and operated by ADM for many years, ceased operations earlier in 2021. In late September, Scoular announced it had purchased the facility from ADM. Under Scoular’s ownership, the facility is now handling corn, wheat and milo.

        First, The Seed / Seedsmens’ Perspectives on Why You Buy the Varieties You Do — “Seedsmen agree that farmers generally view public data as unbiased and therefore more believable. How extensively such data are used is another question. ‘We strongly believe that many farmers do not understand factors vitally important to accurate and dependable testing results, (such as) CV and LSD values, size of plot sample area and agronomic practices used in production,’ says one seedsman. He says some university tests ‘are meaningless because of poor test results, but are printed nonetheless, oftentimes without the proper information for a person to distinguish good data from bad.’
        “Private trials often grain credibility because of their location, i.e., a farmer will tend to put more stock in results from a private trial a mile down the road than in a public trial 80 miles away. ‘Seed salespeople normally will show prospective customers their own local strip trial data and any public trials in which their varieties did quite well,’ states another seedsman. To carry the local factor a step further, farmers often ‘are more apt to believe what a neighbor or elevator man will state than data produced by private enterprise,’ this individual remarks….”

      ‘It’s Still a Learning Process’ / By Don Lilleboe —“From a moisture standpoint, 1991 did not provide a typical season for Rick Lewton to begin experimenting with no-till sunflower. Lewton’s northeastern Colorado vicinity averages 15 to 16 inches of total precipitation per year. In 1991, however, the area received 17-plus inches of rainfall between April and September.
        “While that scenario may not have offered a real test of no-till sunflower’s performance under dry conditions, it did show what the crop is capable of at the other end: Lewton’s no-till confection ’flowers went 2,500 pounds to the acre with a test weight of 21.5 pounds (a good average for the High Plains). Seventy-eight percent ran over a 20/64 screen, for an excellent percentage of large seeds.
      “Lewton is no newcomer to no-till cropping, having produced corn, sorghum and millet under no-till in previous years. The second-year sunflower grower cites three reasons in explaining his decision to experiment with no-till sunflower in 1991: (1) the belief that he could improve seedling emergence over that of a conventional program; (2) hopes of better yields due to enhanced moisture retention; and (3) with the wheat stubble, being able to retain more crop residue following sunflower harvest, thereby aiding erosion control during the ensuing fallow period.”

          190,000 Tons of SOAP Allocations — “USDA targeted six countries in mid-November for sales of up to 190,000 metric tons of U.S. sunflower oil under the Sunflower Oil Assistance Program (SOAP). These announced allocations (as opposed to actual sales) should allow U.S. exporters to remain competitive in world markets, according to USDA. The six countries and their allocations are Algeria (40,000 tons), Egypt (40,000), Mexico (30,000), Turkey (30,000), Venezuela (20,000) and the USSR?(30,000 tons). USDA’s announcement of the sunflower bonuses was accompanied by another one of 140,000 tons of U.S. cottonseed oil for export to five nations.”