That’s right. One of history’s ironies is that the native of the Americas returned, changed and its properties heightened by Russian intervention. Perhaps if Stalin had known this he might have demanded their return to the motherland a century later when the two nations threatened to annihilate each other. It is thought that Russian immigrants to the US and Canada took seeds with them and by the 1880s companies were offering the ‘Mammoth Russian’ in their catalogues - a variety that was sold until the nineteen seventies.
It took a while for the Americans to take advantage of the sunflower as a cash crop and it is first recorded as silage feed for chickens. Then in 1926 the Missouri Sunflower Growers Association started processing sunflower seed in to oil. The secret was finally out and nothing would be the same for the sunflower ever again. The Canadians got the same idea about the same time and the government there started its breeding programme in 1930. In both countries the breeding material (the seeds) came from members of the Russian Mennonite community.
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