It’s too soon to know for sure, but early indications are that Manitoba’s sunflower growers will harvest a higher-yielding crop than they have in recent years.
“I think it will still be a strong year for yield and I think the quality will be better this year than last year too,” said Troy Turner, an agronomist with the National Sunflower Association of Canada.
It will be a good yield, but not a bumper crop, he added.
“It’s been a very interesting year with weather, so we’ve seen a few things we haven’t seen in the past few years — like soft rots. They were always around, but not nearly as prevalent as they have been this year,” he said. “And that has an effect on what comes in.”
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Soft rots like rhizopus and phomopsis have caused breakage and loss across the province, particularly in wetter areas or in locations that saw high winds or storms.
“So if farmers are out there wondering why they have so much breakage this year, it’s because they don’t have just one type of soft rot, they could potentially have three types,” said Turner. “When the sunflower is already weakened and a big wind comes along — and they had some pretty good-looking yields and some big heads out there — it just snapped them.”
Manitoba Agriculture, Food and Rural Development oilseed specialist Anastasia Kubinec said that many sunflowers did go into the end of the season with heavy seed heads.
“Going up right until that third week in September we did still have quite a few days where the sunflowers were accumulating heat units,” she said.
The good news is that while soft rot was a problem this season, sclerotinia head rot was not, giving growers a bit of a reprieve on that front.
Blackbirds however, were not as kind to sunflower farmers this time around.
“The blackbird situation is almost always a problem,” said Turner. “That southwest part of the province has been really struggling with them — with the wet years they’ve had, it just seems like the blackbirds are more prevalent.”
Some producers are turning to unusual deterrents to keep the birds at bay. While noise cannons are nothing new, one producer is playing the sound of a blackbird being attacked by a cat. Another farmer has surrounded his sunflower fields with coloured streamers.
“I get lots of phone calls about it,” said Turner, adding that it can be hard to know what is going to work and what will cover an area large enough to have a real impact on yield.
“But there are definitely people out there with good ideas, trying new things,” he said.
Sunflowers have already been harvested in some areas of the province, but those in the Melita area are still a week or two away from harvest, Kubinec said.
“Now those sunflowers are at R8, so basically the ones still out there just need to dry down,” she said. “So the heat that we did have really helped them along… so they are just drying down, and the guys are just waiting for them to get to the right moisture that they can get the heads off and through the combine.”
Turner added that some producers will also wait until spring to harvest, meaning it will be a while before the final numbers are in.
“In a lot of areas I’m getting numbers that are approaching the 3,000-pound mark, but I think overall the crop will be more of an average year, and most growers will see something in the 2,000- to 2,500-pound range,” he said.
