14 
N. C. AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. 
tion of oil, which has “superseded all other vegetable oils in many 
parts of Russia, and the other with large seeds, consumed by the 
common people in enormous quantities as a dainty.” The cultiva¬ 
tion is considered profitable there, the average yield being about 
1,350 pounds per acre. The oil from the sunflower-seed is obtained 
in Russia very much as cotton seed oil is in the United States, by 
separating the hulls from the kernels and expressing the oil from 
the latter. The sunflower-seed cake is a highly nitrogenous cattle 
food, and is largely exported to Germany and England for feeding 
purposes; the hulls, or shells, of the seed are used as fuel, while the 
seed-cups are fed to sheep*. In the table is shown the percentage 
composition of hand-separated (which is more complete than would 
be obtained by machinery) hulls and kernels of “Mammoth Russian” 
(large striped) and Black Giant (small black) sunflower-seed, and 
hand-separated hulls and kernels of cotton-seed for comparison with 
corresponding parts of sunflower-seed. These analyses show the 
hulls of both varieties of sunflower seed to contain more protein, 
fats, and crude fiber, and less nitrogen-free extract than cotton-seed 
hulls, and indicate that they are at least equal, if not superior, to 
cotton-seed hulls as a cattle food, while the kernels contain more oil 
than the kernels of cotton seed, and, together with the other 
nutrients, show that after the oil is expressed, the sunflower cake left 
will be fully up to, if not better, than cotton-seed cake as a food-stuff. 
r 
i 
Cotton-seed 
\ Hulls, 50 per cent. 
1 Kernels, 50 per cent. 
Percentage of parts of •{ Mammoth Russian sunflower-seed -j KernelM? 9 /percent’ 
! Black Giant sunflower-seed \ £ e U Cent * 
l Kernels, 45.5 per cent. 
The percentages of parts of the two varieties of sunflower-seed 
were obtained by the separation of the seeds analyzed, and are sub¬ 
ject to change with further investigation. These percentages with 
the chemical compositions of the parts presented in the table show 
that whole cotton-seed and whole sunflower-seed do not differ mate¬ 
rially in composition. 
Sunflower-seed were sent out to quite a number of co-operative 
field experimenters by the Station last season, but results of yields 
are not yet in shape for publication. The average yield in five 
experiments in as many parts of the State in 1889 was about 65 
bushels per acre. 
The results of weighings of one lot each of Mammoth Russian 
and Black Giant sunflower-seed at this Station gave 26.7 pounds per 
bushel for the former, and 32 for the latter. The Mammoth Rus¬ 
sian seed, according to our analyses, contain 21.53 per cent, of oil, 
and the Black Giant 20.85 per cent. One bushel of the former 
would therefore contain 5.75 pounds of oil, and the latter 6.67 pounds 
of oil. 
* Abstract Jour. Soc. Cheni. Ind., May, ’92, p. 470. 
