Double Crop Sunflowers with Companion Crops: Profit and Soil Health Together

0:00 This is a field of double crop sunflowers that we're planted about the 10th of July this year. The reason that we're doing this is corn soybean rotations don't have enough diversity for really good soil health, so we want to integrate a cereal crop into it. But cereal crops, they by themselves don't have enough income, especially on irrigated ground, so this is our attempt.

0:23 To show on a large scale—this is a whole half of a pivot here—to show people that you can raise a cereal crop because this is triticale and then double crop something, and the two incomes put together compete very well with corn and soybeans, not only income-wise but from a soil health standpoint they blow it away because the concept here is not just to plant double crop.

0:47 Sunflowers, and these are hybrid sunflower. They're black oil sunflowers and we will be able to harvest these for seed production when they're fully mature. But with sunflowers they let enough sunlight into the canopy early on that we're doing companion crops with it. So we're not only getting the benefit of being able to harvest a second cash crop here but we also have all these.

1:08 Companion crops and Dale is kind of starting to collect some of them here. We've got buckwheat, we've got cow peas, we've got field peas. There's some mustard out here. There's about eight or ten different things out here. There's a few squash here and there, and that diversity is not only attracting a lot of beneficial insects, which helped protect these.

1:30 Sunflowers. This has had no insecticide sprayed on it but I see very little insect damage to these plants. The other thing about this field, this will be the third crop that we harvest off this field in two years. There's been no chemical sprayed on this field for about 15 months. The last time any herbicide was applied to this field was last June on the soybeans.

1:56 And then we planted TR right into this, and you can see all of the TR stubble. The straw here is holding back the weeds. And now these sunflowers with the companion crops are coming on and growing really well, and there's a few weeds out here. You can see a few pigweeds poking above the canopy, but very few. And this is much cleaner than most corn and soybean fields that.

2:18 Have been sprayed multiple times just this summer. Yeah, absolutely, and this is not only an attempt to make that year of a wheat or other cash crop profitable in that crop rotation, but also it's a have your cake and eat it too situation. People say when we tell people well plant cover crops and wheat stubble they say well I need a cash flow, so I have to plant a cash.

3:10 Completely different plant family than soybeans. Add to the diversity of your crop rotation also because when you harvest this you take the top off and like Keith said it lets sunlight into the canopy you can get an understory of plants growing underneath here that are still remaining when the combine leaves and so after you that enables us to put in this understory of

3:40 Vegetation like this buckwheat that has root exudates to improve soil phosphorus content. It allows us to put in some of these legumes like these peas to fix nitrogen or cow peas to fix nitrogen and these brassicas to help break up compaction which the sunflowers by themselves actually do a fairly good job of. And the neat thing about it compared to double cropped soybeans is that after.

4:08 The combine rolls through here the vast majority of this vegetation is still intact on the field. It hasn't been run through the combine, shredded it into bits to where it's going to start moving. This is still standing so you've got winter cover, you've got great wildlife habitat. This is a pheasant's paradise. You've got nitrogen fixation, compaction breaking.

4:33 Pollinators pollinating plants to attract beneficial insects which help with eliminating the need for pest control in the sunflowers. This is a great agronomic system. The best part about this is when you extend that rotation out, you include more diversity in the rotation, you have the cover crops out here. The yields on the following corn and soybean crops are much, much higher than they are in just your typical corn-soybean rotation with a lot fewer inputs.