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July 11, 2003
 The
Australian sunflower industry has been challenged to develop a
bigger and more consumer oriented future, with new varieties
tailor-made for specialty markets and open to value adding in
all their products – oil, meal and hulls.
The managing director of
The Grains Research &
Development Corporation
(GRDC), Professor John Lovett, issued his challenge in a closing
presentation to the 14th Biennial Australian
Sunflower Conference on the Gold Coast.
The GRDC and the Australian Oilseeds Federation were the major
supporters of the conference, which also had the backing of seed
breeding, trading and crushing companies involved in the
sunflower industry.
Professor Lovett said speakers at the conference had pointed the
way for the industry to find a profitable future, in
non-traditional but innovative uses like fibre composite
construction, elite pectins for food manufacture, biodiesel and
Asian style confectionery.
All these fell beautifully into the concept of the GRDC’s new,
five year, research and development plan Driving Innovation, and
particularly into the two significant additions to the GRDC’s
program structure, Value Chain and Product and Service Delivery.
The Value Chain program would invest in research that explored
and developed the potential to add value to grain while Product
and Service Delivery sought to promote adoption of emerging
technologies for greater productivity and profitability.
“Everyone knows now that is health is a priority in today’s
consumer driven society, and sunflowers already have the health
connotation; the public is becoming increasingly aware of the
difference between fats,” Professor Lovett said.
“In the session devoted to nutrition and the food service
sector, conference heard that, while price competition from
other fats and oils is a factor, there’s always potential for a
product that can make a point of difference; chef Tony
Percuoco assured us that sunflower oil has that.
“I
believe the conference was hugely impressed by the suggestion
from Professor Gerard Van Erp’s University of Southern
Queensland team that resins from sunflower oil could be used in
fibre composite construction, whose future uses seem unlimited.
“And by the work being done by Antony Bacic’s group at the
University of Melbourne on the extraction of pectins for food
manufacture from the biomass of sunflower heads that normally go
back into the paddock at harvest.
“Exciting developments like these, with their promise of added
value, should encourage growers to continue to find a place for
sunflowers in their rotations.” |
