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Agriculture This Week: Finding acres for niche crops not easy

The cropping landscape of the Canadian Prairies is an interesting one in the sense two crop whales – canola and wheat – dominate acres in a huge way, and all the other crops and farmland uses acting like a school of small fish going after whatever acres they can muscle away from the big two.

It's not easy grabbing acres from canola, which while having high input costs, and greater risk as a result should a crop disaster strike, it is still the option with the big gross return potential too, and that always looks good on a ledger plan.

Wheat by contrast doesn’t offer the big dollars per bushel, but the agronomics of producing a good crop are well-understood, and it makes a good rotation companion for canola so it gets acres.

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Trending Video

How American Farmers Harvest 1.15 Billion Pounds of Sunflowers

Video: How American Farmers Harvest 1.15 Billion Pounds of Sunflowers

Across the open plains of North Dakota and South Dakota, sunflower fields turn the American landscape into a sea of gold. In this farming documentary, we go inside modern sunflower farming to see how farmers plant, grow, harvest, clean, dry, process, and transform sunflower seeds into valuable products used every day.

In 2024, American farmers harvested about 1.15 billion pounds of sunflowers. This video follows the full journey from warm spring planting to combine harvesting, seed cleaning, storage, oil extraction, refining, roasting, packaging, and animal feed production.

You will see how sunflower seeds are processed into cooking oil, roasted snacks, bakery ingredients, birdseed, livestock feed, and useful byproducts. From golden fields to modern processing plants, this is the story of how a beautiful flower becomes one of America’s important oilseed crops.

Watch until the end to discover how sunflower farming connects farmers, machines, factories, food production, and sustainable agriculture.