Growing sunflowers with a long growing season in Ukraine is no longer feasible – expert

One of the problems in sunflower cultivation during the past season was the significant delay in sunflower harvesting, which caused many farms to incur losses in both the quantity and quality of the crop. The primary cause of this was spring frosts. This is written in an article in The Ukrainian Farmer by Denis Kanazhirsky, the product development manager for sunflowers at "Limagrain Ukraine." "Fearing their negative impact, some farms deliberately delayed sowing to avoid exposing the crops to low temperatures. As a result, sowing times were shifted by 2-3 weeks, which automatically led to later maturation times and the impossibility of harvesting the crop in time," noted Denis Kanazhirsky. According to him, precipitation during the harvest period further complicated the situation. The cause of the delayed harvesting was not only the shift in sowing times or weather conditions but also the choice of hybrids with an extended vegetation period – from 115 to 125 days. "According to the results of our annual analysis for..."