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.

Sunflower field preparation

We had the opportunity to spent a nice day with our friends Juan Fran and his son Diego. An impressive day due to the geographical location (you can see the photos and video) including the Monastery of Uclés (Cuenca) for the helpful machinery they have for their harrowing work. As we have already mentioned, visiting Uclés is always a pleasure as it is a very charming village. Besides, spending the morning sharing agricultural anecdotes with Juan Fran and Diego is always quite entertaining.

With regard to the work carried out, we will talk about the preparation of the field for the next sowing of sunflower, which will take place at the end of April and during the month of May. Let's hope for some rain much sooner as it has not rained since the beginning of January and the cereal and pulse vegetables are already in a critical situation. We do not know how this season is going to end :(

Finally, if we focus on the machinery that we saw working, we can highlight their two New Holland T7 Series, considered as ery robust and beautifully designed tractors. New Holland has a very competitive product in the T7 series. Also noteworthy is the Gil cultivator with the stone protection system based on rubber suspensions. It was the first time we had seen it in the field, and we liked it a lot, I looks very well manufactured with many details that make it a top cultivator. We are used to rubber suspensions system (we have the Ovlac Minichisel) and we always say that this suspensions system is much better than traditional system based on springs... but each farmer has to experience this in the field in order to form his own opinion.

Versión en español.