Hearts of gold

Most years the fields are filled with beautiful sunflowers, and we have always wondered how they were harvested. Today we found out.

Some days ago at an apple festival Brian had asked Olivier, a local farmer, when he was planning on harvesting his sunflower crop, as we’d like to come and take some photos. ‘Tomorrow afternoon’, he told us, in French obviously. Perfect, we could free up our afternoon, and knew roughly where his fields were. So come the afternoon we headed off in that direction. It was a hot, still day, and even from a distance we could see the tall, golden pillar of cloud, and it was not too long before we found him, and another farmer helping, combining through the dark, dry, shrivelled flowers.

The massive combine thrashed its way across the expanse of the field, creating the dust cloud as it went. In the far distance were the tell tale clouds of other farmers all harvesting their sunflower crops.

After watching the machine sweep back and forth a few more times we headed back to Olivier’s farm to see the fruit of his labour. As we arrived he was bringing a trailer full of seed back. It was a slick turnaround, and he was off again, returning around every 10–15 minutes. It was a fast moving operation.

The barn was soon filling up with the tiny seeds. A huge mound, piled high, ready to be pressed by Olivier and Dominique into their golden sunflower oil. You can’t get fresher than that.

Little dark seeds with a heart of gold.