Kids digging into their school lunches, shoppers at a major U.S. grocery chain, and consumers in Greece eating a favorite tasty snack have something in common: They’re all enjoying sunflower seeds grown by CHS farmer-owners and processed at CHS facilities.
In a typical year, CHS farmer-owners grow about 40,000 to 50,000 acres of confection seeds — the edible kind sold as snacks or ingredients in the shell or as kernels — as well as about 5,000 acres of conoil seeds, a cross between oil seeds (which are used for sunflower oil and birdseed) and confection seeds.
Sunflowers can be challenging to grow, but the crop can also be profitable, says Craig Hertsgaard, a fifth-generation farmer in Kindred, N.D., who’s been rotating sunflowers with corn, soybeans, and sugar beets for about 10 years.
“Because sunflowers are a minor crop, there hasn’t been much research in developing products for weed control and disease control,” he says. “So we have to develop a system for planting them at a time when we can control weeds early and during the growing season.”