Will Fulwider 0:17
Welcome to Field Notes. Today we are talking about sunflower production in Wisconsin. We’re looking at a year when our typical commodity crops of corn and especially soybeans and to some extent, wheat, are not on their best economic behavior. Some farmers might be thinking about the possibility of alternative crops into the humble sunflower. Here to chat with us today about production of sunflowers in Wisconsin are Ben Brock Mueller, a research technician in Dr Erin Silver’s lab at UW Madison and Sam Bibby, regional crops educator for La Crosse Vernon and Crawford counties with UW Madison extension. They are also both farmers in their own rights, operating farms in South Dakota and Trempeleau County, Wisconsin, respectively. Thanks for coming on today, Sam and Ben, can you take a second to introduce yourselves and a little bit about your farms as well?

Sam Bibby 1:05
Sure. Yeah, we grow corn, beans, a little bit of alfalfa, bit of rye for our cover crop seed, touch of camelina, just for fun. And then about 15 acres of sunflowers this year that we bag and sell locally for birdseed.

Will Fulwider 1:22
Very cool, just a touch of camelina, that’s right, all right. Ben,

Ben Brockmueller 1:29
yeah. And I’m originally from South Dakota, and although South Dakota is known as a sunflower producing state that I come from the eastern part of the state, where the cropping systems look a little bit more similar to Wisconsin with corn, soybeans, alfalfa, and smattering of small grains here and there. So my experience actually, with sunflowers comes from working as research technician in Aaron Silva’s lab here in Wisconsin, where we’ve done a few years of trialing sunflowers.

Will Fulwider 1:56
Great. I guess I’m going to kind of just start the conversation with, why? Why sunflowers? Why are did Dr Aaron Silva’s lab tried to grow them? It’s organic in that sense. And this is going to be kind of an interesting conversation back and forth between Ben, your experiences with the organic side of sunflower production, and Sam years more so with the conventional. So I think we’ll be able to hit both, both sides of that equation. So I guess, Ben, I’ll start off with you, like, Why? Why are you all interested in sunflowers? You know, is it something that’s been produced in the state and what are they usually used for?

Ben Brockmueller 2:32
Yeah. So for us, sunflowers are historically, been produced in in the state of Wisconsin, and back in the 60s and 70s, there were more sunflower production in Wisconsin and largely got replaced by by soybeans. But there is benefits to sunflowers, especially from the perspective of diversification. First of all, diversification of risk. Sunflowers can handle poor growing conditions a lot better than corn and soybeans, and they’re very adaptable crop. There’s kind of a saying that you can grow a decent crop of sunflowers on a rock pile, and so they can perform well in conditions that corn and soybeans would suffer in. And so it definitely allows for that diversification of risk components. There’s also diversity, diversification of markets you’re not locked into whatever is going on in the corn and soybean markets at the time. So most of the sunflowers are contract growing, and for most corn and soybean farmers, it’s an easy way to diversify, because you don’t really need any additional equipment. If you’re a corn grower, we, you know, use our corn planter and corn equipment for for most of the operations. And then the final piece of it is the ecological diversity piece of it so it allows for an increase in the length of the cropping rotations. Sunflowers come from a different plant family than most of the other crops we grow, which also fits into a different ecological niche. And most notably, there’s, there’s the benefit to pollinators and other beneficial insects. So when you walk out into a field of sunflowers as they’re blooming, it’s, it’s really buzzing with a lot of activity, and that’s fun to see,

Will Fulwider 4:11
plus people love them. Sam, anything to add to

Sam Bibby 4:16
that? Um, yeah. I mean, I think as far as what they’re used for today, I know Ben said that they get got replaced by soybeans. And I think that is certainly true. I mean, the only sort of like larger production areas in Wisconsin, I think I know of are in the northwestern section of the state, where they’re closer to those crushed plants further to the west. But then the only other place I’ve really heard of them getting grown. I mean, they got the century Sun oil in Pulaski, so some was growing out there for that. And then you just see, like, a lot of ads for the kind of, AG, tourism side of things down by Madison and Milwaukee in that area. But otherwise, I don’t see them very often.

Will Fulwider 4:58
Yeah, yeah. They’re definitely. Okay, I do see them kind of pitched into multi species cover crop mixes, particularly after wheat, often, maybe not a mono crop of monoculture of sunflowers, but thrown in there, just for kind of where they have got a nice little taproot and for esthetic reasons as well. Because, again, the people like them stop by the side of the road, take pictures and such. So Sam, I guess, kind of diving in a little bit deeper. How are they fitting into your rotation at home? And, you know, kind of the larger, how could they fit into larger Wisconsin rotations? And are there benefits? Then you mentioned maybe a little bit about that, but maybe we can kind of pick at that a bit. Yeah.

Sam Bibby 5:40
You know, they present an interesting challenge. The I need this to come up right away, but the white mold is really the biggest disease concern, and that’s what drives our rotation for sunflowers. And because white mold is one of those diseases that you sort of get and then don’t get rid of, we are extra cautious about how we rotate sunflowers. So we try to put sunflowers, or I should say, we try to put three or four years of a non host plant for white mold, mainly sunflowers and soybeans, three or four years of not those plants between sunflowers and the next soybean crop. So usually for us, it’s probably going to look like sunflowers three or four years of corn and then soybeans. Whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know. I like to think that the I mean, it does provide larger diversity in the rotation, but unfortunately, we have kind of three years of corn on corn,

Will Fulwider 6:43
but gotcha, gotcha Ben, in your organic rotations. How are you kind of putting them and slotting them in?

Ben Brockmueller 6:53
Yeah, so we’ve kind of seen sunflowers as functionally fairly similar to corn in the crop rotation. So both of them are warm season crops. They get established at similar times. Both of them are nitrogen feeders, although sunflowers not not nearly as much as corn, the white molds is definitely a concern, as Sam brought up, and so you have to be a little bit careful about rotating the soybeans the next year in our organic rotations, we have fairly long rotations in which the white molds issue can be managed a bit more through like different alfalfa phases and small grains and things like that. So it is definitely something that we think about. Though, one of the advantages, too, of sunflowers is it’s a little bit shorter growing season, and so there’s a possibility of getting a small grain established, potentially, after that sunflower comes off, or even cover crops. I know that’s one of the issues with with corn production in the state of Wisconsin, is, how do you get cover crops established? Well, and if you have something like a sunflower with just a little bit of a shorter growing season, we’re usually taking those off late September, early October, which, which offers that opportunity to get something else, like a small grain or or even a cover crop established,

Will Fulwider 8:13
nice and, you know, I as far as fitting them into the rotation, yeah, it’s a, it’s a cash crop, right? It’s not, it’s not like you’re planting it just for soil building or anything like that. Is there anything special about sunflowers that differentiate them a bit from some of our other crops, like wheat or soybeans?

Sam Bibby 8:30
I mean, the number one thing people talk about is probably the soil compaction aspect of it. It sounds like sunflowers, you know, they have a big tap root, and they can drill down through some of those compaction layers and maybe alleviate that some. I think that’s sort of the sales pitch for putting them in some of those cover crop mixes like you mentioned. I guess I haven’t maybe grown them long enough to have a really good idea of how true that is on our soil, but that’s what everybody says so.

Will Fulwider 9:01
And I guess, you know, Sam, you mentioned white mold as kind of, you know, that was right out of the gate. You’re like, this is our issue from a rotational perspective. But what are some of the other challenges in growing sunflowers? Like, why aren’t people obviously, that markets is a whole different conversation, but from a production side of things, you know? What are some of the biggest challenges in growing this crop, and is there a big learning curve for farmers?

Sam Bibby 9:25
Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, harvest is tricky, and getting them dry is tricky. I mean, I know there’s supposed to be a short season crop, but unless you have, you know, a bin set up just for sunflowers that you can run air on with low heat. And I mean, otherwise, you’re basically waiting for them dry in the field, and we’re talking like nine or 10% before you want to harvest them. So that can get tricky to do, and in our experience, it gets late in season. But other than that, there are a few insect. S there’s like a sunflower seed weevil that can cause some issues. And once you have sort of a population, I know they can hang around as well, which is another reason to maybe rotate if you can. But Ben, what do you think? Yeah,

Ben Brockmueller 10:14
I definitely echo the the harvest challenges to that, getting combines set so you’re not having, you know, loss from the from the Combine can be a bit tricky. Drying down, as Sam mentioned, is tricky from the organic perspective, too. One of the things I’ve I’ve heard some farmers say, and we’ve also seen this in our fields, is sunflowers can come back the next year as a weed and be a bit difficult to manage. And I’ve heard farmers say that it shows up in their fields for many years down the road, and can kind of hybridize or cross with wild types on flowers and turn into a bit of a weed issue. And so at the Research Farm, we generally have a policy where we don’t like to hand pull weeds because we want to mimic what field conditions are for most farmers. But after hearing some of this, I had a policy one year where any sunflower we saw, we just pulled it out because we didn’t want to deal with that in

Will Fulwider 11:15
the future. That makes sense, definitely from the weed management side of things. Organic is a bit of a different conversation. And Sam, some of those insects, have they gotten above threshold levels? Were spraying an insecticide or not yet?

Sam Bibby 11:30
Yeah, I guess we haven’t. Maybe scouted good enough to know, but through some small scouting efforts, I haven’t really seen an issue. And I even if they did hit threshold, I don’t know that we would necessarily go spray. We really do like the idea of having a nice crop out there for the pollinators as well, and I think spraying an insecticide during that window would really be pretty hard on them. So we’ll probably just hold off on anything like that, and just try to use our IPM strategies instead.

Will Fulwider 12:05
Nice. And then before we we’re gonna run through the production of it a little bit, to give folks that aren’t familiar with it some more details, kind of nuts and bolts. But I want to, before I touch on that, I want to talk a little bit about market. There’s some mentions of like, some oil pressers in the state and Sam, you’re selling them locally. Are you just doing that off your farm? Or who you are? You just selling it to a local Co Op or something like that?

Sam Bibby 12:31
Yeah, we’re selling them all off the farm now. We’ve got a pretty economically friendly seed, cleaner, cheap, I guess

Will Fulwider 12:41
is what you’d say, friendly. It

Sam Bibby 12:45
works good. And so yeah, we’ve got a little bagging set up. And yeah, we can clean them, bag them, put a little homemade tag on them, and sell them by the pallet to local feed stores and then right off the farm as well.

Will Fulwider 13:00
Excellent, great and Ben folks that you have kind of talked with, or even when you were doing it, what were you? What was the market for the sunflowers that you were working with?

Ben Brockmueller 13:11
Yeah, so we were growing mostly oil seed sunflowers. So again, getting press for oil the the confectionary ones, my understanding are, tend to be growing more out west, a little bit more. So my understanding is they’re they’re mostly contract grown, and places like Purdue, for example, is is one of the the big buyers that work with farmers in the area. And the the meal from the sunflowers is also another economically important way that sunflowers get used and get put into, especially poultry rations.

Will Fulwider 13:50
Oh, interesting. Yeah. I guess going to make make all parts of the plant work for you from an economics perspective. Okay, so just diving into the the production side of things, you know, we’re going to go through the calendar and talk about planting first, you know, is this going in at a similar time as corn? You know, from the conventional side of things, you know, are there herbicide carryover risks that when we work with some of these kind of, more alternative crops, it starts to get a bit more shaky as to how we fit these into a rotations from an from an herbicide standpoint, where we have longer residuals. So Sam, just wondering if you can touch on those quickly, and then you can come back with your organic knowledge on that as well.

Sam Bibby 14:31
Yeah, so I guess we start out, we plant them or plant and I think a 94 day variety, I think that’s it. That’s going in just about as soon as we’re done planting corn, do our soybeans first plant corn and sunflowers right after that, which typically ends up being about mid May. And that seems to work pretty good for us. Don’t really want to go too much earlier than that. They are pretty frost. Sensitive is, my understanding, haven’t had that issue, but, yeah, we haven’t had any herbicide carryover issues yet. I know that there are. I mean, most of your residual herbicides using corn could potentially be an issue for sunflowers, but we haven’t, haven’t seen that, I guess, at our application rates, but we are planting them after a corn crop that gets mesotron and Atrazine and maybe some group fifteens as well. So nothing too crazy, but no issues. We’re generally shooting for like about 22,000 or 22,500 seeds out of the planter. And I think we’re most of the stuff we’ve been planting is about 90% germs, or shooting for about 20,000 plants, usually about an inch and a half, two inches deep. And we’re always using the corn planter. We do have a finger we have finger meters on our corn planter, which are not ideal. I wish that we had a VAC planter. I think that would do a lot better job. We seem to get a fair number of doubles with the finger meter, but not too many skips, I guess. So that’s probably more important. But I know people have talked about using the drill, and I guess I am probably against that. I think, you know, sunflowers don’t branch, so it’s not like they’re going to fill out like soybeans do, if you have, you know, inconsistent spacing. But so I like them, if we can get them metered out nice, I think that probably makes a difference. But otherwise, we’re on 38 inch rows, and as far as fertility goes, I mean, we can talk more about this, but our we do have an nlpp plot, so that’s the nitrogen optimization pilot program. Maybe it’s not a pilot anymore, and we’re running six different end rates replicated four times across this plot, and we just have one year data so far, but it pointed right at, like, about 60 pounds of N put on at planting via 28% was about perfect.

Will Fulwider 17:15
So Gotcha. So no side dressing. It’s all, it’s all at planting,

Sam Bibby 17:19
yeah, and actually, I mean, unlike corn, where, you know, if you topped off another 20 pounds of nitrogen, you might pick up a few bushels, we noticed that over application, you know, anything over, like, 100 pounds of n, maybe even less than that, we got lodging, and so it was harder to harvest, and actually lost yield there. The head size really doesn’t change. The plant just gets taller and easier to tip over. So, yeah, there’s really a negative impact to going over on nitrogen

Will Fulwider 17:50
with sunflowers. Yeah, Ben, what have you all learned?

Ben Brockmueller 17:55
Yeah, so for growing sunflowers, we’re thinking a lot about a lot of the same things we’re thinking about when planting organic corn. So from a timing perspective, we want that soil to be pretty warm, so that sunflower gets out of the ground quickly and has a chance to compete and out compete with the weeds. We definitely don’t want to go too early, because we want to avoid any kind of seedling damping off issues that might be a little bit more common under cold or wet soil conditions. So from a timing standpoint, we’re usually looking around late May, which is again, about that that same time that we’re planting corn, we’ll go in with a corn planter, put corn seed plates in there. We’ve always used a planter rather than a grain drill. My understanding from using grain deal is you’re probably going to get some more doubles and skips in there than using a planter, and so I think the planter will do a better job with more uniform seeding. We’ve planted about two inches deep, which is maybe a little bit on the deeper ends, but from a perspective of mechanical weed management, we want that plant to be well rooted in the ground, so it’s a little bit harder to tear out when we go through with our tine leaders and rotary hose and all that stuff. We’re going on 30 inch rows. And the main reason for that is that’s just what our equipment is set up for. And from a from a from a row perspective, especially when we’re doing like field cultivation and things like that, you want to use the row, the Row Settings that you have the equipment to do. So it would be a real sad day if you went out there at a 30 inch row cultivator and planted on 22 inch rows, or something like that. From a population perspective, well, we’re going a little higher than than what Sam mentioned from the organic perspective, and that’s to compensate, again, for for losses, for mechanical weed management. So we typically plan around 26,000 seeds per acre, and at the end of the day, we probably come out somewhere relatively similar to the this. Numbers that Sam has in the lower 20 1000s.

Will Fulwider 20:06
And yeah, we’ll, we’ll

Ben Brockmueller 20:07
do again, kind of our standard set of weed management out there. So after planting, maybe three or four days after planting, we’ll go through with a tine weeder and do some blind cultivation, and we’ll make a couple passes more with that tying leader rotary hoe, every five days to one week for the first about three weeks or so that that sunflower is growing season. And then after that, we’ll go through with the row cultivator. Maybe get two passes of of row cultivation. And by that point, that sunflower is starting to get some pretty good size to it and a little bit more susceptible to damage. But once those sunflowers get some size in, they’re really, really competitive. And if you’ve got those big leaves that really shade out anything, and once they can it be over, it’s really pretty simple to control weeds from that

Will Fulwider 20:58
point on, gotcha. And from your, you know, organic perspective, compared to some of the other crops that you have in the rotation, like your corn, soybeans, whatever, how competitive against weeds are they when they canopy? Is it pretty similar to corn? Or is even more so or less so?

Ben Brockmueller 21:13
Yeah, I would say it’s pretty similar to corn. Once it gets to the canopy stage, they they are a little tricky from the start, so you you want to get pretty good weed management early on, otherwise the weeds can really take off and become issues in that similar, again, to corn crop, I found from my experience that they are a little bit more susceptible to damage doing Tang weeding and rotary hoeing than a corn plant is, and so you have to be a little bit careful with those. They’re fairly similar to like a soybeans in terms of susceptibility to damage. But the difference is, with soybeans, we have such high populations and we can get away with a little bit of loss, whereas a little bit of loss here in a sunflower field, and we’re only planting 26,000 seeds per acre. There’s a bit more risk to that, so we have to be a little bit careful with that tiny weeding. Making sure things are are set right is really a critical component to it. Gotcha.

Will Fulwider 22:13
Gotcha. Awesome. Sam, from you mentioned white mold. Are there other diseases and you had some pests in there that we have to think

Sam Bibby 22:22
about. Yeah, there’s a few. I’m not too familiar with all of them. I know Downy Mildew is a big one that they always have disease ratings for for all the varieties. So we haven’t seen too much of an issue with that. And then there’s some stalk rots and head rots that you can get as well. We’ve seen some of those things out in the field. Nothing that’s been damaging to our bottom line by any means. And it did certainly seem like, and this is anecdotal, but that we had maybe more disease pressure on some of those higher nitrogen rates than we did on some of the lower medium ones. So it was a little interesting. But otherwise, yeah, we’re just planting a treated seed that comes in the bag, and unfortunately, I couldn’t tell you what’s on it, but I know there is an insecticide and a fungicide on there, and other beyond that, though, we aren’t having too much an issue, I guess, gotcha.

Will Fulwider 23:26
And I guess to kind of round up the production side. You had mentioned that you know, for farmers that are planting corn and soybeans, that this is a pretty easy transition. You use a corn use a corn planter, use a corn platform, and then, you know, how are we changing some of the settings on the combine, thinking about sieves and fans that might be different. And then, when it comes to post harvest, you know, mentioned the drying is quite difficult to get to that dryer, waiting for it out in the field, just wondering what your thoughts are on that, Sam, we can start with

Sam Bibby 23:59
you. Yeah. As far as harvest goes, we’re using our ih 1666, and we’re running pretty much the large wire concaves slotted grates. Was a change that we made for sunflowers. I believe they recommend some cover plates on maybe the back two sections of those slotted plate slotted grates as well. But beyond that, we’re using a corn head to pull the heads off. Certainly have some head loss there. Wouldn’t mind upgrading to something like an all crop head, or maybe a grain platform with the sort of snoots that you can buy for those. Otherwise, it’s working pretty good with, like, the same sieves and everything that we use for corn, the issue that I’ve had the most with combining is that with sunflowers, you’ll get these hollow seeds or these, like, hulls that don’t have any inside to them, and so those will blow out the back, no problem. But the problem is. Trying to find out what your yield loss is out of the back of the combine. And so if you combine something, you go walk behind your machine, you’re going to see what looks like a whole bunch of sunflowers all over. But it’s really like these hollow hulls that don’t have anything in there. So it’s a little bit tricky to, you know, I get nervous like turning the fan up too much, because I see that back there, even though I know, you know it’s not. But so you’re gonna have to use a pan and throw that under the machine while you’re running, and then blow out all the empty holes to check and see if you’re getting any, you know, real good seeds going out the back or not. But so that’s it’s a little tricky, but not too bad, I guess, yeah.

Ben Brockmueller 25:43
So for us, we did similar to what, what Sam said. So we’re running a corn head for for harvesting and, and, yeah, they do definitely see some heads that fall out of the the corn head, here and there. But it’s, it’s, it’s the best we got. And I think, you know, an upgrade to an all crop head would would be better. And I know a lot of the guys who who are really serious about growing sunflowers tend to tend to like to running those. But for what we were doing, a corn head worked just fine. And yeah, as as Sam mentioned, definitely, definitely saw some loss out the back of the combine. And so getting those fan speed settings right was was something I had to play with a fair amount, and we ended up harvesting it a bit on the dirty side, just to try to prevent loss out the back of the combine. Most of the the settings that I used were just from our combine manual. So rotor speed concave setting. I just pulled from there, and then just kind of made some infield adjustments to try to fine tune it a little bit more. And we put the adjustable corn sieves in there, and that seemed to do a pretty good job as well. One thing I did notice was difference in moisture content of the sunflowers seeds for how much loss we were getting. So I found if we were harvesting it on on the dry side, so 10% moisture or less, it was a lot more susceptible, a lot more a lot easier to blow out seeds out the back of the combine and lose, lose some yield that way, whereas if we went a bit on the wetter side, so this would have been like 1213, even up to 15% moisture seemed to do a lot better job. And so you do have a bit more drying consideration at that point if you’re if you’re going on the wet side. But for us, we did a better job in harvesting it.

Will Fulwider 27:40
You know, having grown sunflowers in my garden, those seeds drop. And so are you worried at all at harvest time, by letting it go too long to try it and dry it down, that those seeds are going to fall off the head? Or is that, you know, the varieties that we’re planting for oil seed, it’s it’s really not an issue.

Ben Brockmueller 27:57
Yeah, we definitely saw it. And we were doing a Variety Trial too. And one of the challenges with with variety trials is things mature at different times, and you kind of have to pick one day to go out and harvest it, and it might be ideal for one of the varieties and less than ideal for for other varieties. And we did notice on some of our earliest maturing varieties, there was some, some droppage going, starting to occur on some of those heads. So if we, if we waited longer, I would anticipate more of those seeds to drop out.

Sam Bibby 28:31
Gotcha, yeah, you know, the one thing we didn’t mention was birds and yeah, you don’t have to wait for them to drop, to lose seeds off the head of your sunflower. I mean, birds will do that for you, very, very happily. So we have found that planting bigger fields and further away from the woods is always a good call. We did. We planted one small, like acre and a half field in the creek bottoms just because we thought it looked nice by the road. I wasn’t even a point in trying to harvest it. It was Wow, picked clean before it was dry. So oh my gosh, yeah, it happens. But now the birds are out there. They know, like the black bird flocks, like our and the Dakotas, they they are the issue, if you have cattails, a lot of those prairie potholes, then you’ll get these big flocks of blackbirds, and they can just decimate 80 acre fields, from my understanding. So

Will Fulwider 29:32
very Hitchcockian, the birds are the scourge of the sunflowers.

Ben Brockmueller 29:39
Cool. Well,

Will Fulwider 29:41
I think that really gives us a pretty good synopsis of how we go about producing these this crop in Wisconsin. Is there anything else that you all want to add here at the end? Sam, you have something Well,

Sam Bibby 29:55
I guess the only thing we didn’t mention was conventional weed management. Yeah. Are worth, which I think is it’s worth mentioning that it’s tricky, but we do have a couple options. We have herbicide tolerant options, so they’re not not GMO crops, but Express Sun sunflowers and Clearfield sunflowers are both bred to be tolerant to either the Clearfield herbicide, which is the same as Raptor, or the Express herbicide, which are both group two herbicides, they do an okay job on a handful of weeds, and they do a less than okay job on maybe some of our more hard to control weeds like waterhemp and giant ragweed. So so they’re out there. They do help some, but we haven’t had exceptional luck. We do plant and express some variety, so we have that option, but our main strategy has been to get a good burn down, either at plant or just before plant, with the full rate of group 15. Zidua is what we’re using, and that has seemed to carry us pretty well. I know we’re leaning on that herbicide a lot, and it’s not really a great strategy for herbicide resistance management, but it is really like the one thing that’s worked good for us. So

Will Fulwider 31:24
just don’t let Rodrigo hear that. That’s right. Ben, anything else to add?

Ben Brockmueller 31:31
Um, so I’ll just talk a little bit about fertility management. Sam, I’m sorry I missed maybe you mentioned this in the conventional side, but from the organic side, we’re looking at about 7080, to 90 pounds of nitrogen per acre, is what we’d be looking for to help that sunflower along. So oftentimes we’re putting this in following alfalfa crop, which can provide about that much nitrogen, or we’ll go in with liquid dairy manure and put that down as a source of fertility as well,

Sam Bibby 32:02
and we didn’t, we didn’t mention P or K either, but it’s worth mentioning. I mean, the phosphorus requirement is pretty low. I think the recommendations with an optimum soil test are, like 20 pounds of phosphorus and potassium is a little higher at like 40 pounds. So we have decent phosphorus levels, so we’re not even worrying about that low of a rate, but we will just spread out like 40 or 60 pounds of potassium in the fall before sunflowers.

Will Fulwider 32:31
Excellent, excellent. Well, that about wraps it up. Awesome. Sam and Ben, thank you so much for coming on and chatting sunflowers with us today. We really appreciate it. You

Sam Bibby 32:43
bet. Thank you.

Will Fulwider 32:55
Thanks for listening. This has been Field Notes from UW Madison extension. My name is Will Fulwider regional crops educator for dane and dodge counties. A big thank you to Joe Ryan for creating our theme music and to Abby Wilkymaky for our logo. If you have any questions about anything you’ve heard today or about your farming practices in general, reach out to the extension agriculture educators serving your region.