Sunflower Harvesting and our 15th Anniversary

One of the last harvesting tasks of the year is sunflower harvesting, which usually takes place in September and October (though in recent years it has been happening earlier, and in our area it now almost always occurs in September). The final harvest of the year will be the olive groves in December.

However, in this post, we’re not only talking about sunflower harvesting — we’re also especially excited because we’re celebrating 15 years of publishing content on our blogs!

On 12 October 2010, we published our very first post, dedicated to the sunflower harvest — you can see it at this link. Since then, we’ve shared our work and that of many friends through several posts each month, always accompanied by photo reports and, in many cases, videos published on our YouTube channel.

It’s also worth noting that our first video was uploaded to YouTube on 20 November 2008. Since then, we’ve published 517 posts, written in both Spanish and English.

We want to thank all of you for following us, reading us, and sending in content to keep our blog alive. We also extend our gratitude to our sponsors, who help us sustain this project and often lend us their products so we can test them in the field — always independently and free of charge.

As for this year’s sunflower harvest, yields were quite low, as usual. Sunflower is a crop we sow in May and harvest in September, which means it goes through the driest months of the year. From sowing to harvest, it hardly rains at all.

This summer was particularly harsh, with extremely high temperatures throughout August, causing severe water stress on the plants. Yields have averaged around 800 kg/ha, and with a rather low price (around €450/tonne), it has turned out to be a poorly profitable crop.

We continue to sow sunflowers because they are part of our eco-friendly crop rotation system, but in practice, it has become a residual crop in our area due to the increasingly dry and hot summers of recent years.

Versión en español.

Harvest 2025. Cereals and pulse vegetables

In the middle of the harvest season, work progresses day by day with the aim of harvesting all the grain in our fields as soon as possible to avoid potential problems—mainly caused by summer storms and hail.

In terms of results, it has been an extraordinary year. Following last year’s record cereal yields, this season promises similarly exceptional performance. And why is the main reason? Because we have had a very wet winter and spring (around 420mm in 2025). Normally, average barley yields are about 3,500 kg/ha; last year we reached 5,700 kg/ha, and this year we expect a similar figure… although we cannot confirm it definitively until harvesting is complete.

As for legumes, which is another of the main crops in the rotation, they have fared a bit differently. Lentil pods failed to develop fully—likely due to a brief heatwave—yielding about 800 kg/ha, which remains a strong result. Peas continue to be steadfast, averaging 1,000 kg/ha, though their market price does not command the premium that lentils do.

We’re in the thick of harvest and remain optimistic. We hope for a very good harvesting campaign for everyone!

Versión en español.

Cereal harvest. Extraordinary year

Throughout the year we have been recalling the disastrous cereal harvest of 2023 in every single job we have undertaken during this campaign. Even the post we dedicated last year to the harvest was entitled "Harvesting 2023. Annus horribilis". It truly was a year of very poor yields, resulting in significant economic losses. This year, the situation has been the exact opposite, culminating in a record harvest. I don't remember a year as bad as 2023 and we don't remember a year with such high returns as we have experienced in 2024.

These days, with the cereal harvest practically finished, we are looking at the yields and we obtain a really high average for unirrigated fields: 5,800kg/ha of Medinaceli barley (all the barley we have sown is of this R2 variety). In our area, an average of 4,000kg/ha is considered very good, so this year is extraordinary  One mistake we made due to last year's poor results is that we have a lot of fallow fields and we did not sow as much cereal as we could have sown.

It is true that we have done some things differently this season, specifically in sowing (using lower seed doses), in fertilisation (different types of fertiliser thanks to the slight drop in prices) and in spring with the fungicide treatment (which is not very common in barley in our area). Howevre, the main factor has been the 325 mm of rain we have had since January, which has been very well distributed over all the months of the year. I don't think we have had any long period where you can say there has been a lack of water.

Now, we are left with pulse vegetables and triticale... we will see what yields we get.

Versión en español.