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 Butter is not enough in life. Animal fats are good, but not with every meal. For the body to work well, you need vegetable oil. Anyone. But not less than one third of all fat.
Humanity has tried a lot of all kinds of oils. Started with olive (and is now honored). Then they went: cottonseed, mustard, sunflower. And in the tropics - palm. In difficult years, they got along with rapeseed and rapeseed. Whoever sowed flax ate flaxseed. Who grew hemp - hemp. Where there is an abundance of apricots, apricot is poured into porridge to this day.
After the war, very rare oils came into fashion: corn and wheat. Doctors began to praise the healing qualities of sea buckthorn oil. Burdock was not forgotten either. And absolutely a delicacy is cedar - made from pine nuts and walnut made from walnuts. Sesame stands alone. There are also a lot of fats in its seeds, but we see them only when we buy the most delicious in the world tahini halva... These fats spread on the paper in large transparent spots.
It is difficult to say from which seeds you cannot get vegetable oil. It is squeezed even from watermelon seeds. And pumpkin seeds contain so much that is enough to flavor dinners throughout Romania. Common sunflower seeds are consumed a little in Romania. It is replaced by pumpkin.
Now a new era has come in the kingdom of vegetable oil. The scientific world has found a number of defects in sunflower, linseed, cotton. They try to match them to the perfect olive. Breeders create hybrids where the seeds contain more vitamin E and other blessings. These improved oils have already appeared on the market.
- Why do you think sunflowers do not grow beyond the Arctic Circle? - Asked the American botanist N. Klute. - Yes, for the simple reason that the sun does not set in the North in summer. Spinning and spinning across the sky. The sunflower twirls its yellow basket after him and turns so that the basket will come off. This is where it ends!
 Jokes as a joke, and many to this day think that the inflorescence of a sunflower turns in unison with the movement of the sun. And that there is a secret connection between the plant and the daylight. Believing in this, the Serbs called the restless plant a sun twist. Many physiological scientists are confident in the ability of this large herb to copy a homing device, as it were. And it's hard to argue. One has only to look at the sea of shining baskets at noon. Their faces are really directed towards the sun!
There seems to be only one doubting person, Professor V. Morozov from Saratov. I watched the sunflower sea for three years. For different varieties. From morning to evening. And even at night. Observations were filmed every hour. The result was stunning: the baskets did not move. What position they took during budding, they remain in that one. This is not enough. In the crush of sunflower, on the same day and hour, the baskets look in different directions. Some, as expected, to the south. Others to the southwest. Still others go east and west. And some are straight north.
The belief that the baskets follow the movement of the sun, apparently, came from the general appearance of the sunflower field.
On a hot afternoon, all the baskets seem to be facing south. In fact, not all, but only the majority. The most important thing is that this majority is oriented to the south not only at noon. In the morning, the baskets are directed there, although the sun is in a completely different place. It is just ascending from the east. The same baskets that meet the sun rise remain directed to the east even when the sun moves to its zenith.
So, the sunflower familiar from childhood, flaunting on the covers of botany textbooks, upon a close meeting with it, turned out to be not so simple at all. And in the not so distant past, he suffered through troubles. Now he is the number one plant in the world of oilseeds, but it was in this world of oil that he got only two centuries ago. His fate has changed more than once.
The Spaniards took the sun-twirl out of the New World after the voyages of Columbus. Not at all because of the oil. I liked the cheerful, cheerful appearance. Became an ornament of flower beds in European gardens. And he was such for a long time, until he came to the attention of the associate of the Russian Academy of Sciences I. Lepekhin. He in 1768 drove through the Orenburg steppes and lamented, looking at the plight in the land with firewood. Then he remembered about sunflowers, and an original solution to the fuel problem came to mind. He threw down the slogan: “Sow sunflowers! Dry the stems! Everyone can stock up on a hefty stack of firewood over the summer! "
I don’t know how the people of Orenburg took the Lepekhinsky advice to sow sunflowers, but in the scientific world it was not forgotten. And thirty years later, the Free Economic Society pushed one of its members - court councilor F. Roggenbuk - to take practical steps. In 1796, this venerable man chose a tithe of land and planted a sun spinning plantation. The trouble took a lot. Sowed in greenhouses. Transplanted in the field. He fenced it with a binding of poles so that the wind would not break fragile stems. The harvest was considerable: he was completely provided with firewood, in addition, he also filled with oil. And for livestock feed stock. True, he admitted that he was rescued by "the slops from the kitchen and from washing dresses." It was they who dung the land and ensured the success of the business. However, as we will see further, it was impossible to solve the sunflower problem with slops alone.
Meanwhile, the public liked the sun twister more and more. And not so much with firewood as with seeds. At the time of N. Gogol, golden baskets stuck out only in the gardens, and a hundred years later, so many were planted in the fields that the whole Donbass was filled up with husk.
Finally, they began to make butter.
In the middle of the last century, oil flowed like a river in Russia. The proliferation of plantations, however, was fraught with the constant threat that some pest would appear and, multiplying rapidly, strike an unexpected blow. And such a blow was not long in coming. In 1869, nothing seemed to foretell disaster. On the contrary, the prospects for the harvest were so promising that oil producers threatened to pour oil all over Europe. And then suddenly everything collapsed. The plantations were covered with a layer of dust, similar to snuff. Rust! Parasitic fungus! And no means of struggle.
Yet among the dying giants, the peasants noticed individual healthy stems. They stood out for their normal green color against the background of decay and destruction. These unique brilliant greens turned out to be immune to disease. Zelenki multiplied, and plantations resurrected again. However, there were still many trials ahead for the sun spin. The second blow was delivered by the broomrape. No longer a mushroom, but a flower parasite. It clings to the roots of the owner and lives at someone else's expense. It happens that around one stem there are ten to twenty broomrape. And even a hundred - two hundred! Like a dense bush under the trees. It is difficult to get rid of the invasion. The bunny is over-fertile. One plant produces one hundred thousand seeds. They fly beautifully in the wind. They remain in the soil for ten years.
 Found among the sunflowers and this time brilliant greens that resisted broomrape. Seeds were collected from them. And the oil fields came to life again. The oil poured out again. And as if on purpose, fate prepared the third test for the spinning sun - this time the pest appeared in the form of a silver-gray moth. In 1896, her caterpillars worked on all plantations. They gnawed through the hard shells of the seeds, eating the oily kernel. On one basket, there were a hundred pieces. If it got crowded, the extra parasites left the basket. They went down to the ground, along thin silk threads of their own production and moved to neighboring plants.
A year later, the area of sun twists was reduced by three times. The most sophisticated measures of struggle were proposed. Agronomist J. Schreiner undertook something like a night moth hunt. Armed with a gauze net, one of the moonless nights, he went to a field captured by a pest. A worker walked ahead with a shining kerosene lamp. He spread the rough baskets with his shoulder. They closed behind him again with a heavy crunchy rustle. Disturbed butterflies flew up in brilliant clouds.Schreiner waved and waved his net, raking in hundreds of silvery midges. He was very pleased with his invention. I even wrote a book and gave advice in it: to make bonfires on plantations. The moth will rush to the fire and die in the flame. However, there were not so many moonless nights, and the advice could not be used.
However, by this time they found another, more convenient way to get rid of the excessive attention of the moth. The Saratov owner I. Karzin noticed that the moth did not touch the California decorative sunflowers. This plant is completely different from its oilseed counterpart. His leaves are cucumber, for which he is nicknamed cucumber-leaved. There are not one baskets, but dozens. There is a whole bouquet on one stem. By autumn, flowering, the baskets become globular and easily lose seeds.
What a seed that cucumber has! Under the outer skin a black layer is visible, hard as cast iron. Almost pure carbon. Karzin guessed that it was the carbon barrier that prevented the caterpillars from entering the oil cell. He crossed a cucumber with a local variety. The carapace trait, a black carbon layer, was passed on to the offspring. This is how a new, Karzin variety appeared. True, at first he carried in himself not only salvation from moths, but also something not entirely desirable.
Recall that cucumber leaves are distinguished by an abundance of baskets. It is this property that the Karzin hybrid inherited. As soon as the plants in the field matured, the second, third, and fourth ones appeared after the first basket ... The concerned owner ran out into the field with a knife and began to cut off the excess ones. But they were replaced by new stepsons, almost from behind each sheet. And on those, in turn, more and more! In 1909, the "Rural Owner" lamented about this: twice a year they have to stepchild! Is it too expensive to pay for armor?
However, everything ended well. The carapace varieties with black seeds have taken hold. And if in the field the black-seeded ones found themselves next to the white-seeded ones, the hordes of moths rushed to the latter. And in 1913 E. Plachek (also from Saratov) bred a variety that was resistant to broomrape and moths at once. It still exists today. In the fifties, academician V. Pustovoit strengthened the defense.
Now the varieties are also resistant to rust! And the oil in the seeds has increased. It was 35 percent, now 50! The Pustovoitites have also changed the very nature of the sunflower. The Firstborn variety gives almost ... olive oil!
It would seem, what more could you want? However, there are still many worries with the sun spinning. Who would have thought that an increase in oil content would lead to a thinning of the husk - the fruit shell? And who would have thought that thinning the rind would be the weak point of new varieties? But what is the situation. The thinner the husk, the lower its strength. Stronger fragility. The seeds were damaged more often. A damaged seed is an ideal breeding ground for molds. Penicillus, aspergillus and other evil spirits began to appear in warehouses more often. And where there is mold, aflatoxin, a carcinogenic toxin, is often found. The problem urgently needs to be addressed.
There is another problem as well. It was announced at the 1978 International Conference by Czech scientists V. Shkalo and A. Kovachik. It is difficult to grow sunflowers in Czechoslovakia. When it starts to ripen, it rains. To catch up with showers, you need early maturing varieties. There are such varieties, but the plants are undersized. The undersized ones have smaller baskets. The smaller the basket, the lower the yield. The Czechs decided to make up for the decline. Instead of one basket on the stem, grow two, three, five ... After all, wild sunflowers are just that. Branched. How can one fail to recall the efforts of the Saratov resident Karzin, who with all his might fought against branching! Czechs have to do just the opposite.
And now about how and where our hero lives. About half of all crops we have in the Soviet Union. The whole vast Asia produces a tenth of ours. In South America, Argentina alone sows the sun. Half the size of us. Africa is four times smaller than Argentina.
The most surprising was the fate of the gold basket worker in his homeland - in North America. Wild sunflowers still cover thousands of acres in the New World.Wherever a place is vacated, it is immediately occupied by a sunflower. An expert on this plant, the American agronomist C. Heizer recently wrote that when it comes to the golden basket, he first thinks of a huge garbage heap near the University of Missouri and the railway tracks of the local station, on which sunflowers grow in such abundance, what they can't even see the rails!
Observing the truth, I will make a reservation: until recent years in the homeland, the sunflower was valued not as an oilseed crop, but as a garden flower. We selected varieties with red flower baskets. Oil was considered more profitable to harvest from soybeans, since it will be born well in America. And many people still believe that the homeland of the sun spin is not America, but Russia! And it was only when our breeders bred super-oil varieties that the Americans realized it and took this crop seriously. Over the past decade, they have increased crops tenfold. But even now they are four times behind us.
It remains to be said about the birds. The easiest way to get seeds from baskets is feathered. The sparrows sit on the edge of the basket and busily gouge the fruits one by one. They are so carried away that zoologists come close and copy the impudent consumer at the workplace. They eat seeds and tits. And especially siskins and tap dancers are fond of. Food, in general, is new to them. Earlier, as it turned out, they interrupted on thistle achenes. The family is the same - Compositae. Only the fruits are smaller and fiddle with them more.
For a long time, the fox puzzled biologists. Sunflower seeds are constantly found in her stomach. But no one ever managed to catch Patrikeevna for the robbery. And it’s hard to imagine how a red-haired cheat would climb a stem, so unreliable and fragile. It was even more surprising when the fox refused the basket of sunflower offered to her for breakfast. The following was found out. The birds lose some of the fruitlets. On the ground, they are picked up by gophers. The fox eats the gopher. As a result, the seeds are in Patrikeevna's stomach. She will take them to distant lands, and in the place where she leaves her “visiting card”, a new stem with a golden basket will grow.
A. Smirnov. Tops and roots
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