Sunflower oil is one of vegetable oils trending worldwide including Indonesia. Its nutritional value and benefits that can be used as cosmetic ingredients, drugs, home cooking oil, margarine and other industrial needs making the demand of Indonesian society on the oil is increasing. However, in fact, production of sunflower seeds in Indonesia is still very limited and tend to only leads to the utilization of sunflower seed as food ingredients.
This regard is the background of three agricultural students of Brawijaya University to have research in order to explore potential genotypes of local sunflower which have high oil content. The three are Ayu Nurlaila Indah (Faculty of Agriculture 2013), Sanu Dwi Orlimao (Faculty of Agriculture 2013), and Maharani Mega Candra Kartika (Faculty of Agriculture 2014).
“We see communities and industry which need sunflower seed are very keen on import from countries like India. Whereas in Indonesia lots of sunflower germplasms which can be developed and formed into superior varieties to suppress the import value. FAO data also shows that Indonesia import value on sunflower oil annually always increase, meanwhile recently other countries has started to focus on producing vegetable oils from 90% of sunflower seed to produce,” said Sanu, one of students who researching sunflower.
Recently Faculty of Agriculture team researching sunflower in Kepuharjo Village, Malang and will immediately analyze its oil content from potential genotypes to be observed. So it will soon be obtained one or several genotypes that have high oil content and potentially to serve as candidate varieties.
By the research, can be generated information on agronomy and genotypes character of sunflower which has high yield and capable to produce oil ingredients. As well as to improve the development and production of sunflower seed resulted from free crossover in high oil content, and able to fulfil communities and industrial needs on the high demand of vegetable oils,” he explained. [Vicky/Humas UB/trans. Denok]
