Strong winds over the past week or so have really helped to dry down Manitoba's sunflower crop.

Ben Friesen, senior market manager with Scoular, says harvest has begun on confection sunflowers in many regions. He adds most of the crop coming off the field to this point has been desiccated.

Friesen says so far they have been hearing of some good preliminary yield numbers in the range of about1,600 to 2,500 pounds per acre.

"The seed itself, the quality is really good," he commented. "Because it was so dry this year, there's a bit of a problem with some of the sizing being a bit small. With confection sunflowers going into the roasting, etc, you're always looking for as many as possible of the really large size and this year they didn't all make it all that big."

Friesen says they are seeing a bit of sclerotinia this fall, however there was not a lot of disease issues to speak of after this year's dry growing conditions.