Potential for sunflower products in the US

Sunflower oil is popular in Mexico, the Middle East and Japan, because of its clean taste and appearance. Sunflower oil has been a premium oil and for the US, the oil has been an export-dependent commodity with 60-90% sold overseas. Most of the importing countries enjoyed a subsidy from their governments but these have been curtailed from time to time. This led to a glut of sunflower oil in the US and oil was then sold to domestic users at a discounted price. This did not help the growers. 

Traditional sunflower oil is excellent for cooking, making salad dressing, margarine, and so on, but it cannot be used for manufacturing shelf-stable fried foods because of its poor oxidative stability. The oil must be partially hydrogenated for industrial frying application. 

Total saturated fat content Oleic acid content Finoleic acid content 

Crop year Total sunflower harvest (million hectares) Change in harvested area (%) NuSun harvested (million hectares) NuSun hectares (% Total) Yield of seeds (tonnes/ hectare) Average oil in seeds (%) NuSun oil yield (thousand tonnes) 

A recent report shows that sunflower seed/oil is being used in the extruded form to blend into cattle feed. This supplies the necessary oil and replaces the animal fat from the current feed. Some feel that this provides a safeguard against mad-cow disease . Cottonseed is widely used in dairy cattle feed in North America, but sunflower feed has produced equivalent results in dairy cattle feed and this could open up a sizeable use of sunflowers in North America (The Sunflower, December 2001, Nutritional Study on NuSun). 

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