Sunflower seeds

Sunflower is one of the brightest symbols of Ukraine, its natural beauty and fertility. However, this plant originates in America. Ukrainian fertile soils are well equipped to produce the sunflower seeds of the highest quality recognized worldwide.

All languages of the world translate “sunflower” as a “sun’s flower” (lat. Helianthus). This flower follows the sun. The botanists call that heliotropism.

Sunflower seeds are used for sunflower oil, halva, kozinaki, margarine etc. The oilcake is used for production of paper, soap and polish.

Sunflower seeds export is the leader in the Ukrainian market. Farmers produce it most willingly, despite this crop exhausts the soil.

Ukrainian suflowers are usually up to 2 meters high. They are blooming all summer long and provide harvest in the middle of autumn.

Many farmers sell the harvest to oil factories. It is vital for Ukrainian economy to export agricultural products, not only raw material. The remaining cake is used for a livestock feed. Sunflowers are also used for a non-allergic latex production.

Sunflowers not only exhaust soils, they are able to improve soils quality removing lead, arsenic and uranium. Sunflowers also neutralize radionuclides and harmful bacteria. In particular sunflowers were widely used to remove caesium-137 and strontium-90 in the Chernobyl affected area as well as in the Fukushima Daiichi area later.

Suflowers arrived to Europe from the Americas where it was cultivated by the Aztecs and by the Incas. The Incas used to worship the sunflower, because they regarded it as a symbol of the sun.
Apart from Ukraine, the sunflower is the state flower in Kansas, USA, and in Kitakyūshū, Japan. The sunflower is also used as a symbol of green ideology and a symbol of the Vegan Society.