Ukrainian sunflower seed: it all starts with high-quality seeds

For several recent years, sunflower seed confidently kept the status of "the king of Ukrainian fields", and remained one of the most high-demand crops. The reasons are quite simple: high demand from oilseed processors, who plan to supply Ukrainian sunflower oil to foreign buyers, because our country is the main global exporter of the product. Although, the profitability of sunflower seed is not as stable, as agrarians would like to get, the cultivation of sunflower seed remains rather profitable business, and domestic agrarians show consideration for the issue of the oilseed growing. In particular, they do not save on seed materials, because they understand that seeds form the basis of high-quality and quantitative characteristics of the future harvest.

For 10 recent years, Ukraine continues gradually increasing the production volumes of sunflower seed, as well as growing the yield figures. In addition, for 5 recent seasons agrarians managed to successfully avoid any considerable hops in the yield results. Of course, it is the effort of imposition of the advanced agricultural technologies, including high-quality seeds.

As for the supply and demand balances of sunflower seed, provided by APK-Inform analysts, it is obvious that every year Ukraine imports nearly 25-30 thsd tonnes of the oilseed for seeds purposes. At the same time, every year agrarians use nearly the same volumes as seeds from the new crop.

Cost of seeds is the important component of the prime cost of sunflower seed. According to the State Statistics Committee, the share of the cost of seeds for sunflower of the harvest-2017 formed 14.1% of the cost, which is quite a significant figure, and only corn has the higher share — 14.7%. As a comparison, the figures of wheat and rapeseed total 7.2% and 6.9%, respectively.

The figures about the harvest-2018 will be available in July, however, according to the Executive Director of the Seed Association of Ukraine, Suzanne Grigorenko, it is unlikely that the share of the cost of seeds in the cost structure of sunflower seed will decrease — agrarians already recognize the significance and economic efficiency of using of high-quality seeds, as well as its impact on the yield and quality of the produced oilseed. To date, sunflower seed remains one of the most profitable agricultural crops, due to the high demand from oilseed processors, therefore the demand for high-quality seeds will continue steadily growing.

At the same time, Ukrainian agrarians are actively using both seeds of foreign selection and domestic Ukrainian seeds. To date, there are more than 700 varieties/hybrids of sunflower seed represented on the Ukrainian market. According to the survey of farmers, farmers used more than 250 varieties of sunflower seeds of different producers for the harvest-2018, and according to preliminary figures, in 2019 the figures will become even higher. The TOP-10 of Ukrainian seeds producers, preferred by Ukrainian agrarians, includes both large-scale multinational companies such as Syngenta, and several Ukrainian institutes:

At the same time, to date the Ukrainian market of seeds faces not only the competition of producers, but also the growth of trading activity of distributors of seed materials. According to our annual survey of agrarians, the company Eridon became the absolute leader in supplying seeds to the agrarians growing sunflower seed, also the TOP-10 includes such successful distribution companies as Agroscope, Bizon-Tech, Trade House Nasinnya, Spectr-Agro LLC, AgroRos, etc.

The market of seeds in sunflower segment continues successfully developing. According to S.Grigorenko, the list of the major trends of the market includes effective competitiveness between seeds suppliers, high variety of hybrids and countries-suppliers, which allows to agrarians to choose the best products for the soil and climatic conditions of the certain farm. Also, the expert focused on increasing of the use of herbicide-tolerant hybrids, stable demand rates for high-oleic sunflower seeds, etc.

According to the current forecast of APK-Inform Agency, in the current year Ukraine will harvest nearly 15 mln tonnes of sunflower (at the level of last season). At the same time, the weather conditions were quite favourable: due to domination of rather warm weather in the period of April - the first half of June, the development rates of sunflower seed demonstrated rather heightened rates. The growth of air temperature throughout the whole country, which began in late May, caused the intense accumulation of heat. As of June 15, the sum of the effective temperatures above +10°C exceeded the average long-term figures by 7-18°C. The increased heat supply caused the rapid growth of development of sunflower hearts and buds, which started earlier by 2-3 weeks compared with the average long-term periods. We wish sunflower seed areas to get good weather in the coming months, and agrarians — good purchasing prices for the oilseed.