Blooms go bust across region

Sunflowers used to be as bright as their name for farmers struggling with low commodity prices, but economic indicators suggest that their glory is fading fast in Northern Colorado.

After peaking at $13.25 per hundredweight in 1996, prices for this new Colorado crop de-clined slightly, then plummeted to $9.25 per 100 pounds, or hundredweight, in 1999.

“It was last year when they took a drastic plunge,´ said John Green, an economic analyst for Colorado State University.

In recent years, Colorado farmers started turning in droves toward sunflowers as an antidote to anemic commodity prices, selling seeds from the colorful crop for oil or confection.

In 1991, the first year sunflowers were grown widely in Colorado, the crop brought $9.50 a hundredweight. In 1996 and 1997, sunflowers went for $13.25 and $12.50 a hundredweight, respectively.

In 1998, Colorado farmers harvested 135,000 acres of sunflowers at $11.75 a hundredweight. Most of the crop came from Kit Carson, Washington, Adams and Yuma counties, but Weld County accounted for 8,700 acres planted and 8 million pounds harvested in 1998, according to figures provided by the Agriculture Statistics Service of the Colorado Department of Agriculture.

Encouraged by the continuing high dollars, Colorado farmers planted 265,000 acres of sunflowers in 1999, and prices plunged.

So far, 2000 hasn’t seen any improvement, according to figures published by the National Sunflower Association, located in Bismarck, N.D.: Prices for the oil-bearing linoleic and NuSun seeds at the Goodland, Kan., crushing plant are $6.40 and $6.90 per hundredweight.

“That’s the lowest in a long time,´ said John Sandbakken, marketing director for NSA. “Last year, linoleic (seeds) were going for $8.05, and they’re $6.40 now.”

Lance Fretwell, deputy statistician for the Agriculture Statistics Service, blamed part of the farmers’ problems on their own success.

“The ’98 crop was huge,” Fretwell said, citing numbers that reached 5.3 billion pounds.

The ’99 crop was good as well, coming in at 4.3 billion. Some of those crops still remain on the market.

Agricultural rebounds in Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia, also contributed to the dramatic drop in U.S. sunflower prices, said Larry Klein-gartener, executive director of NSA.

“You have to understand that the world market gets its price for oil from palm oil,” Kleingartener said, and a bad drought in Southeast Asia had severely limited the world’s palm-oil supply.

With palm-oil supplies down, demand rose for sunflower oil in poorer countries with large populations, such as China, India and Pakistan. As the Asian farms recovered, people in those countries turned back to the cheaper palm oil.

Since 81 percent of the U.S. sunflower crop is grown for oil, prices began to fall, leaving farmers with the confection market. And with so much product already out there, “you can only sell so much birdseed,´ said Fretwell.

Is the sunflower bloom over in Northern Colorado? Probably not, experts say.

The Goodland crushing plant provides a nearby market, and as prices recover, which Green and Sandbakken believe they will do later this year, farmers will be tempted to give them another try.

“I think we’ve bottomed out, and I think the price will improve this year,´ said Sandbakken, who is keeping a close eye on Argentina, the world’s largest exporter of sunflowers.

The Argentine crop is predicted to be small this year, following a drought during the growing season and heavy rains during harvest time.

“They still have 80 percent of their crop in the fields,´ said Sandbakken, “and there are supposed to be more rains on the way. The market reacts very fast to weather conditions like these.”

Sandbakken also said oil-seed production in the U.S. has been cut 10 percent to 15 percent as more farmers shift to soybeans.

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