History of sunflower

 The development of the commercial sunflower has been a multi-national effort spanning continents and thousands of years. The sunflower is native to North America and was first grown as a crop by indigenous tribes over 4,500 years ago. Native Americans cultivated the sunflower from its original bushy, multi-headed type to produce a single-stemmed plant bearing a large flower.

The crop’s multiple uses included milling for flour or meal production to make bread and cakes. Seeds were roasted, cracked and eaten whole, either as a snack or mixed with other grains, nuts and pulses into a type of granola.

The early Americans also discovered that sunflower oil could be extracted and used for cooking.

Aside from the crop’s value as a food, archaeologists have shown sunflower had a variety of non-food uses.

The sunflower’s oils and pigments were used as a sunscreen or the basis for a purple dye for skin, hair or textile decoration, while the plant’s sturdy, fibrous stem was exploited in construction.

The sunflower continued as a staple within North America for about 4,000 years until it was discovered by European explorers in 1510. Spanish sailors were the first to gather up large quantities of sunflower seed and ship it back to Europe.  

But for the next 200 years, Europeans overlooked the food and oil-bearing potential of sunflowers. Instead the exotic-looking flowers became widespread across Western Europe as an ornamental or, to a lesser degree, medicinally as an anti-inflammatory.

Sunflower growing developed throughout the 1700s and had spread across Europe into Russia and Ukraine by the turn of the 19th century. Demand for sunflower oil boomed and the crop area expanded to more than 800,000 hectares across Russia and Ukraine in the early 1800s.

As the acreage continued to grow, the market for the crop diverged into two distinct areas – oilseed and seed consumption. With this divergence, the Russian government established the first research programmes to develop varieties that met the requirements of the twin markets. 

An enormous variety known as the Mammoth Russian was developed in the late 1800s. It was packed with many hundreds of large achenes with heads often recorded at more than 50cm in diameter. 

At this time a steady trickle of eastern Europeans had begun to emigrate to North America. Among them were Russian settlers who began to import the sunflower, predominantly as a protein-rich animal feed.