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| Sunflowers should be a good fit for organic management in N. IL.
Our experience growing sunflowers organically in W. IL has been very positive agronomically.
Sunflowers can be planted as early as corn or later than soybeans. About 10 years ago, we had a season that was so wet that a field slated for corn was not fit for planting until the second week of July. We planted half the field to sunflowers and then got rained out. We finished planting sunflowers the 4th week of July. To our amazement, both plantings produced a mature crop.
Sunflowers are very competitive with weeds and weed control is relatively easy, especially if you plant in late June or July, when weed pressure is much lower.
Sunflowers don't require much fertility and its easy to grow lots of legume N before planting sunflowers if you plant late.
Sunflowers seem to have a positive effect on soil tilth and have worked well for us ahead of corn.
the main drawbacks we have experienced are:
volunteer sunflowers in small grains are a mess
special equipment is needed for harvesting - a row crop head works well we have to travel 20 miles to rent one and it doesnt fit any of our neighbor's combines.
markets are far away.
organic prices haven't been great except for when we sold the seeds for sprouting and in this case the buyer was very picky.
Do you have a market lined up?
Joel
WIU Agriculture
BTW this fairly recent bulletin from the U of MO may be of interest: https://extension.missouri.edu/media/wysiwyg/Extensiondata/Pub/pdf/a...
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SUNFLOERS AS CASH CROP IN NORTHERN IL
