posted 5 years ago
I might switch to a chainsaw, back when I did corn, that is what I used to harvest the stalks. It was fast and easy. I just walked down the row and over they toppled.
As for a homestead way to do an acre of sunflowers, I have two ideas, but none have I tried...
1. Take the heads and throw them into a homestead sized Chipper/Shredder. I have a 10 HP Tomahawk Chipper/Shredder and use it quite often for making corn silage or mixing feed like Alfalfa Cubes with grain for a custom lamb ration. I cannot see why that what not beat off the seeds from the big heads. You make have to have a secondary screaning process to screen out the pulpy-debris from the seeds, but that would be easier to do than digging out individual seeds from the head. Shaking the outflow of the chipper/shredder over hardware cloth would get you fairly clean seed I would think.
2. Along the same lines is using a cement mixer. I would think if the heads were somewhat dry, beating around in the drum over and over again would dislodge the seeds. If you wanted too, you might add some type of "shot", like rocks or baseballs to help dislodge the seeds, but as I have not tried this, I am not sure what the perfect DIY system would be. I am just thinking of a low cost machine to get you started.
Both machines can be bought at Harbor Freight on the cheap side, and might make for a nice test machine. If something worked, you could scale it up. You might also be able to borrow, or rent these machines as a test.
For what it is worth, I would like to make my own sunflower harvester as well, probably a purpose-built machine to go on my tractor as we want to raise small grains. I include sunflowers in that equasion.