Jury Out on Sunflower Crop

Sep 01, 2022

Sunflowers stood out in Monday’s Statistics Canada report as being one of the very few Prairie crops expected to see a production decline this year compared to 2021.

However, industry sources report mostly excellent sunflower conditions, certainly better than a year ago when severe and widespread drought badly dented the production of most crops.

“Last year, we had a lot of heat stress through the growing season and a lack of moisture. This year, we’ve had ample moisture and very little heat stress,” said Manitoba Crop Alliance director Gregg Fotheringham, who grows sunflowers near Reston in the southwest corner of the province. “There’s been very little insect damage and better growing conditions all the way around.”

In its model-based production estimates this week, using a combination of satellite imagery and agroclimatic data, Statistics Canada estimated 2022 Canadian sunflower output at just under 62,000 tonnes, down almost 20,000 from a year earlier and potentially the smallest crop in five years. Sunflower seeded and harvested area is estimated down from last year, but StatsCan also put the average yield at 1,681 lbs/acre, a surprising drop of 7% from 2021.

Heavy rains in Manitoba, where most of Canada’s sunflowers are grown, caused a delay in spring seeding which resulted in the drop in acres. But sunny and warm weather in August has been improving the condition of the crop.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids