Current Sunflower Price Predictions

From the Farm and Ranch Guide:

Sunflower appears to be taking competition for acres very seriously this year as bids for new crop continue to climb.

“New crop bids for 2008 oil sunflowers continue to increase in response to the increasingly bullish prices for other commodities,” said Larry Kleingartner, executive director of the National Sunflower Association. “All three crushing plants are offering Act of God contracts and the Enderlin and Fargo plants are offering a 2008 cash contract without AOG.

“With the tremendous surge in all new crop prices, the confection processors have also responded and have increased their new crop prices as well and are now offering a contract of $30 per hundredweight for all size seed production at the Northern plants,” he added.

In fact, Dahlgren recently rolled out a new crop offer of $37.50 for confection sunflowers. New crop contracts for confections in the High Plains are reaching as high as $35-$37 for the large seeds and $22 for seeds falling through a 20/64 round hole screen.

This is in stark contrast to last year at this time when new crop values were in a range of $16.30-$17.35 for oil sunflowers and confections were $19.50-$20.

“It does not look like these prices will back off in the weeks ahead as the competition for acres will continue to be intense,” Kleingartner said.

While sunflower prices continued to climb, the wheat markets' meteoric rise slowed a bit last week with spring wheat prices falling about $10 in some locations.

“It appears that a good portion of the investment money is now going into the oilseed sector, particularly the Chicago soybean oil futures market,” Kleingartner said. “That market has increased by 15 percent in the last two weeks. Sunflower prices have responded as well with most locations at or above .30 cents per hundredweight with confections at a premium to oils.”

Not all aspects of the sunflower market are surging, however, as the sunflower bird seed market is reported to be slowing down.

“Estimates are that demand will decrease from 10 to 20 percent as consumers shy away from the substantial price increase at the retail level,” Kleingartner said.

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