|
Almost 25 years ago, we planted 18 acres of oilseed sunflowers. We live in central Indiana, and nobody else around here was doing this. The things grew well, yielded well, and about 2 weeks before we were going to harvest them, the processing plant in Illinois where we were going to take them closed down. Had to truck them all the way to Duluth MN, and took a loss on them. We planted them with a 4-row Model 56 IH corn planter that had spacer rings under some sunflower seed plates. We put them in just deep enough to cover them after the soil was worked well. We fertilized them like corn, used herbicides in the manner we would have for soybeans, and had a lot of fun with them. We harvested them with an IH 615 combine. Airplanes would change course to fly over when they were in bloom. Newspaper reporters showed up. We had more traffic down this gravel road that summer than we'd ever seen, before or since! Bees came from miles away. If there had been a good place to market them around here, I think they would have caught on.
|
