Sunflower's Potential To Expand In East Griqualand

With its relatively mild summers, East Griqualand has never seen large-scale sunflower production. Thanks to recent advances in breeding, this could well change, says Corné van der Westhuizen, Pannar Seed’s marketing agronomist in North West. Lloyd Phillips reports on this development.

- Lloyd Phillips

Maize, which is a monocotyledonous plant, has long been grown successfully in East Griqualand for grain and silage production. However, farmers in the area have been limited in their options for profitable dicotyledonous summer crops that they can grow in rotation with their maize.

This is primarily because East Griqualand, which straddles the border between KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape, has milder summers, with fewer heat units, than much of the rest of South Africa’s grain production areas.

However, due to developments in breeding, sunflower is showing promise for this particular purpose, according to Corné van der Westhuizen, Pannar Seed’s marketing agronomist in North West.

“In the north-west regions of South Africa, where sunflower is common, production is usually planned around a farm’s primary maize grain crops. For this reason, the yield and quality of sunflower harvests there are generally below full potential,” says Van der Westhuizen.

Sunflower production planning, he adds, should incorporate field selection, hybrid selection, fertilisation planning linked to a realistic yield target, and selection of an appropriate planting date and plant density.

FIELD SELECTION

The first aspect of field selection is to analyse the land’s production history. This should include the following:

The crops that were grown previously on the land;

The herbicides and other measures that were applied to manage weeds in these crops (with particular note taken of any atrazine-based products);

The weed species that were difficult to control using conventional actions;

Projecting the weed species that could be a threat in the coming summer season, and deciding how these should be managed.