Sunflowers for Cover Crops: Deep Roots and Budget-Friendly Biomass

0:13 Yeah let's talk about sunflowers a little bit. We've got a couple different types of sunflowers here. In general sunflower, we like sunflowers.

0:22 In our plots for a couple of reasons number one it's very deep tap wood and it's inexpensive seed for these open pollinated sunflowers and they're highly mycorrhizal they've

0:34 Got a great root system, very supportive of earthworms and other biology in the soil. At this growth stage here, cattle eat them pretty well. They're fairly palatable now when they get

0:46 Bigger they're not going to be as palatable, but it's just hard to find a cheaper tap root to really go after some of those action layers and.

0:55 As you can see out here, we don't have a tremendously solid stand and we don't necessarily want that for cover crop sunflowers. We generally only use one or two pounds an acre because

1:06 We don't want them to dominate the entire cover crop mix. We just want those tap roots every so often kind of punching holes down through that hardpan. Yeah, and if you look at everything that we've filmed today, this

1:18 Is by far the most impressive biomass of any single species. I mean sunflowers and they're not really a cool season crop. I mean you'll never see them over winter.

1:42 Cool season or a cool tolerant warm season. But it seems to work pretty well at colder temperatures than any other warm season plant.

1:52 And the root system people talk about.

1:55 The taproot. But to me I'm impressed by just the volume of the root system. Very good soil conditioner. They're attractive to a lot of beneficial insects.

2:08 Just a lot to be said for putting a pound or two of sunflowers and a lot of different cover crop mixes. Yeah and I'll talk just a little bit — we've got both the cobalts which are over here and

2:20 They're definitely taller. They're a true hybrid but they're very expensive also. This is what we would plant if we wanted to harvest the sunflower seeds to haul to the crush plant for the oil market.

2:33 For a cover crop we're not necessarily concerned about seed production as much as just that root growth and development, so we would use more of a peridovic type or open pollinated type sunflower. Probably aren't going to get quite as big but it's a fraction of the cost, so it's still going to accomplish what we want but we're keeping our seed cost down quite a bit by using that.