TUNKHANNOCK, Pa. — Brown Hill Farms in Lemon Township near Tunkhannock are known for their flowers.
"In the spring, we grow tulips, almost five acres of tulips, and in the summer, about August, we have usually about 30 acres of sunflowers," said Scott Brown, Co-Owner of Brown Hill Farms.
Flowers that draw thousands for fun family activities and photos.
"This time of year, the sunflowers are not very photogenic. We're at harvest season, so the sunflowers are fully mature, and they're dried down and they're ready to harvest," explained Brown.
Harvested for their seeds.
"These particular sunflowers are harvested for bird seed, so we harvest these, and we take them to a feed mill in Hop Bottom, called Ross feeds, and we run them through a bagging machine, and they're all bagged in 50-pound bags, and that's how we sell them," said Brown.
And getting to this point is weather-dependent, according to Scott: "They have to be dry, yes, or they will not store. If they're too high in moisture, they're going to get hot, moldy, and they'll be no good. So we have to wait for them to get down to a certain moisture level."
The Brown families farm corn, wheat, and soybeans, too, and use the same combine to harvest the sunflowers.
It's tall, wide, and a little bulky to drive and takes attention to detail to make sure the sunflowers are kept on track, "So the machine cuts the sunflower head. It goes into the machine. It gets thrashed or beat up, and it has a sieve that separates the garbage from the good seeds, and then it goes into a tank, where it's kept in there until it's transferred into a truck," said Brown.
"Almost everybody asks, what do we do with the sunflowers? And this is the answer. This is the answer: we harvest them. So a lot of a lot of the sunflower farms, they just chop them down. But we, we have been harvesting sunflowers for almost 20 years. It'll be 20 years next year," added Brown.
As long as I don't break the machine when we're all done, winter rye will be planted until it's time to replant sunflowers here next year.
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