Sunflower ‘waste’ now providing extra income to farmers

BAICHENG: Yang Li is busy decorating his new apartment with the extra money he made from selling parts of sunflowers that were previously discarded.

Yang, a farmer from Shuanggang village of Jilin province’s Baicheng city, used to eke out a living selling sunflower seeds from 1ha of farmland. Now, thanks to new technology, he can make an extra 54,000 yuan (RM32,900) a year with sunflower disks – the hard round centre of the plant left over once the sunflower seeds are harvested.