Sunflower Plant - Your Online Source for Information on Sunflowers
All About the Sunflower Plant
The sunflower plant is one of the few that is native to North America. It grew wild and the Native Americans were the first to cultivate it into different seed varieties. They used the sunflower plant as food, pounding it into flower to make bread, mush and cakes. They also ate it as we do today, cracking open the seeds to eat as snacks. They were able to extract the oil from the sunflower seeds to be used as cooking oil..
Aside from food considerations, the plant was also used to make dye, as a skin and hair treatment, and medicinally to treat snakebite and other conditions. Dried stocks were used for building material and the plants used in ceremonies. Every part of the plant was used for a different purpose and nothing went to waste.
In the eighteenth century, the sunflower plant became very popular in Europe. It is thought to have been introduced there by the Spanish. Peter the Great was responsible for the widespread cultivation of the sunflower plant. Its primary purpose was for oil production. A patent was granted in England in 1716 for squeezing the oil out of sunflower seeds. Another societal use was brought about by the Russian Orthodox Church, which forbade oil and oil food products from being eaten during Lent. The sunflower plant, however, was not on the restricted list and gained wide usage as food.
Russia was the first country to massively produce the sunflower plant. In the early 1800s there were over two million acres of sunflower plants being grown in the country. It was used for food and for the vegetable oil derived from the plant. A man named V.S. Pustovoit developed a breeding program that vastly increased production. Today there is a prestigious scientific award named after him--the Pustovoit Award.
It seems a strange circular route but in the late 1800s and early 1900s the sunflower returned to North America, where it began. The sunflower plant was first used commercially as silage for chickens. By 1926, the Missouri Sunflower Growers’ Association was learning to process the seed for cooking oil. Canada was next to develop sunflower breeding programs. They licensed a Russian sunflower plant hybrid, Peredovik, which produced huge crops with a very high oil content.
Hybridization of the sunflower plant occurred in the United States in the 1970s and there were over five million acres in the U.S. planted in sunflowers. Much of this was made into sunflower oil and exported to Europe. They bought the sunflower seed and then crushed it in their own mills. Europe is still the largest consumer of sunflower oil today but only a very small amount of it comes from the United States.