KernAkuell December 2020, News
Oil pumpkin yields 2020
Scramble for pumpkin seeds
The assumptions made in the summer this year as a result of the weather conditions were confirmed by the yield situation in the growing regions.
Styria, the original pumpkin growing region, suffered under the excessively wet conditions, which led to heavy harvest losses as a result of fruit rot and many localised hail storms. The South Burgenland was similarly affected. By the time the harvest season came round, the demand for pumpkin seeds was already high and prices rocketed. Even the above-average yields in part of Lower and Upper Austria were unable to contain the situation.
And although contract-growing prices have risen year on year since 2018, it was clear from the 2020 harvest that farmers are still not as willing to grow pumpkins as they were at the peak in 2016 – after all, minimum contract prices for the current harvest are still 20% below their 2016 level.
Fewer and fewer producers in Eastern European countries are happy to accept the price difference between their pumpkin seeds and those from the PGI area. In consequence, the cultivation area and hence the availability of seeds outside Austria has stagnated. The shift towards cultivation in Austria will continue.
The organic oil pumpkin has already made this move and it is only in Austria that growing areas have increased; in Eastern Europe, where they were already at a low level, they have declined further as a result of low, “non-market-conform” prices that make organic production uneconomic.
Austria will in future be an even stronger focus of our oil pumpkin growing. Yield security – while always affected by the general sensitivity of the oil pumpkin to weather conditions – is most reliable in the Alpine regions. This stability will be reflected in stable prices – something that production in regions with heavily fluctuating yields and corresponding price volatility cannot offer!
Ein kleiner Einblick
The biggest contract grower
of oil pumpkins PGI
Alwera AG, Estyria’s parent company, is responsible for production of the raw goods via a contract farming system. The two companies have for some years maintained the largest PDI area of oil pumpkin in Austria and they know the fields and the farmers personally.
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Traditional Styrian
stamp press process
While modernity has brought progress in many areas, the traditional Styrian stamp press process is still the best way of making pumpkin seed oil. The main difference between this and other pressing methods is that we work with open roasting pans. At our plant, people check when the pumpkin seeds are perfectly roasted and so will yield the very best oil. This enables our experienced oil millers to produce the pumpkin seed oil that has won more prizes than any other – and which as a result of this type of pressing retains all the natural constituents. The untreated oil is not filtered; the particles that make it cloudy settle naturally when the oil is left to rest.
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