Fava Herb’s Contract Growing Programme delivers a dependable, traceable, and scalable sunflower seed supply chain built to serve oil refineries, animal feed manufacturers, glycerine and oleochemical producers, and food processing companies that need consistent volumes at predictable prices, harvest after harvest.

Sunflower is a high-value oilseed crop with growing global demand for its oil, meal, and industrial derivatives — but supply reliability is often the bottleneck for buyers sourcing from smallholder-dominated regions. Fava Herb solves this by contracting the harvest before it’s planted. We coordinate cultivation across a network of vetted farmers across East Africa’s sunflower-growing regions, providing agronomic support, input financing, and quality oversight from seed to delivery, so the tonnage and quality you contract for is the tonnage and quality you receive.

How the contract works

Every sunflower supply agreement is structured around a minimum order of 100 metric tonnes, giving buyers meaningful, planning-grade volume rather than fragmented spot lots. A 50% deposit, held with our bank, is required at contract signing as a good-faith commitment to the harvest — this deposit is what allows us to guarantee your allocation, finance the farmers producing it, and lock in the acreage needed to meet your tonnage. Pricing is fixed at contract stage to suit your budgeting and hedging needs, protecting you from mid-season volatility. All prices quoted are farm-gate, giving you full visibility and control over your own storage, freight, and logistics arrangements from origin.

Why buyers choose contract-grown sunflower over spot purchases

• Continuous, predictable supply — volumes are planned and planted against your order, not sourced opportunistically after the fact.
• Fixed, bankable pricing — know your input cost before the season starts.
• Farm-gate transparency — no bundled logistics markups; you control the supply chain from our farm gate onward.
• Traceable origin — every tonne is tied to a known network of contracted growers, supporting compliance, ESG, and food-safety documentation requirements.
• Built-in scalability — as your demand grows season over season, our farmer network and financing structure are designed to grow with it.

Built on real benefit to the farmers who grow it

Fava Herb’s contract model is engineered so that the buyer’s guaranteed offtake becomes the farmer’s guaranteed income. Every contracted farmer in the programme receives crop insurance against weather and yield failure, has their harvest prepurchased before planting (removing market-price risk from their side of the equation), is supported with input financing to afford quality seed and fertiliser, has the option to intercrop sunflower with other seasonal crops to protect household food security and income, and gets access to discounted, solar-powered water pumps to improve irrigation without adding to their cost burden. The result is a more committed, better-resourced farmer base — which translates directly into more consistent yields, better quality control, and a more resilient supply chain for you.

Whether you’re securing feedstock for sunflower oil extraction, high-protein meal for animal feed formulation, glycerine and oleochemical inputs, or food-grade sunflower seed, Fava Herb’s Contract Growing Programme gives you the volume certainty of a long-term supplier with the transparency of a farm-gate relationship.

Get started: Minimum contract 100MT. Submit your specifications and target delivery window to receive a fixed-price contract offer and deposit terms.