The specially-bred sunflowers with seed that produces high oleic oil, a high-grade cooking oil sought by commercial food makers, has been successfully tried in Canterbury and is ready for commercial production.
The Canterbury production is being driven by Rolleston firm Pure Oil New Zealand with a clear market for an end niche product.
While initially for the domestic market there might be opportunity for export down the track.
Pure Oil managing director Nick Murney said the oil is destined for a new market in the food manufacturing sector.
Having successfully tried the specialist sunflower seed over the past couple of seasons Pure Oil has contracted cropping farmers across Canterbury for a larger area to meet the commercial product demand.
“This is an exciting development with expectation at this stage that this will be a new arable crop and food product for the region.”
Imported sunflower hybrid cultivars were tried to gauge crop yields and oil potential over the past two seasons with 150 hectares harvested last April.
That planting doubled this season for this April’s harvest.
Murney said the oil is at the high-value end of the cooking oil market rather than competing with the big volume commodity oils.
It’s also deemed a more healthy option than standard sunflower oil.
And with demand continuing to grow for the new Good Oil product, the company will be looking for more growers in the future.
Traditionally, any sunflowers grown in NZ have been destined for birdseed.
The new variety once crushed is marketed under the Leg-Up brand in meal for horse feed.
While he had looked at the new product opportunity previously Murney, who, with a team of investors, established the business in 2012, said it was a case of getting one thing right before starting another.
The first thing being the fine-tuning the production of Pure Oil’s rapeseed oil.
“Now we have that well sorted the time is right to move on and add the sunflower product.
“In 2017 we did a 60ha trial, in 2018 we doubled that to 120ha and this year at 300ha we are getting into full swing with farmers keen to come on board.”
While the rapeseed oil does have export markets in China, Australia and Malaysia, Murney expects, at least initially, the sunflower oil will be absorbed in the growing demand by NZ food manufacturers.
“We are still learning, every year is different and until we get the yields up we will be concentrating on meeting the local demand,” Murney said.
Canterbury cropping farmers have been keen to take up the opportunity to grow sunflowers as an alternative break crop.
In full bloom on Stu Pankhurst’s Aylesbury farm in central Canterbury, the sunflowers are a first for him and he’s pretty happy with how they’re shaping up.
With a shorter crop rotation of 120 days, very minimal input and the beauty of the flowering crop gracing his farm, Pankhurst said it’s fitting his system well and so long as the wind and birds stay at bay he’s hopeful of three to four tonnes to the hectare at harvest.
Getting up towards $900 a tonne it will also sit well in the farm budget, Pankhurst said.
From a farmer perspective it does a good job as a break crop, it’s not too thirsty for water, it’s in the ground late November-early December and out by April.
Pankhurst said aside from it looking pretty he was keen to get something else into his cropping rotation with his farm system growing small seeds, peas, cereals, grass and clover and over the winter finishing Te Mana lambs, a specialist breed meat lamb.
“I think it will work. It’s all looking pretty good at the moment.”
“It’s a local company, local product, local market. I like to see the end product of my work on the shelves – I’m all for local,” Pankhurst said.
Pure Oil operates grain handling and storage facilities with seed cleaning equipment and a large grain dryer on its Rolleston site.
Farmers are still testing the harvest but so far 75% of all crops grown have been harvested with a normal combine while some farmers are choosing to make some adaptations to their combine fronts to ensure they capture all the sunflowers.
“We aimed for 60,000 plants to the hectare and we have nailed that,” Pure Oil agronomist Keith Gundry said.
“It’s all ticking along to plan and we welcome any farmers keen to grow for us to get in touch.”
