One of the summer jobs I had as a student at Iowa State, was working as a Research Aide at the North Central Regional Plant Introduction Station (NCRPIS). I was on the Oilseeds team and while we did work with a few different plants, the bulk of the research was done on sunflowers.

There were many jobs to do during a season at the Plant Introduction Station, but for this post, I am going to focus on three. The bagging, measuring, and threshing of sunflowers.

Bagging

Bagging is done while the plant is still growing. We planted hundreds of rows of sunflowers. I can’t even remember the number of varieties there where, but generally speaking, the variety of one plot did not have the same variety planted in the neighboring plot.

For the study I was helping with, we needed to bag a minimum amount of plants per plot, and these plants would be hand pollinated by myself and the other summer workers.

Measuring

After the season is over the bagged sunflower heads are harvested and dried. Once they are dried (and there is time) the heads need to be measured. This is exactly what it sounds like. Someone takes the sunflower head and measures the diameter of the head and the area in the center of the head without viable seed. All of this information, and more, is recorded in a spreadsheet.

Threshing

This one is not obvious in the name, but is easy to explain. Threashing is just removing the seeds from the sunflower head. Once the seeds are removed they and other plant bits are poured into a blower to separate the viable seeds from the non-viable seeds.

Training

All of this seems pretty straight forward, and it is, but there is a specific way all of it needs to be completed. The only problem was people were not trained in the same way everytime. In comes the Sunflower Standard Operating Procedures (SOP). I spent a few days compiling everything I knew and worked with the full time employees to ensure I knew the exact way things needed to be completed. Once I was confident I knew what was what, I finished writing the document. Then was the test. I didn’t know if the document was actually complete, so we had a person from another team walk through the SOP on a single sunflower head. Luckly, I only needed to make minimul changes to cover the missing areas.

After I started learning about web development, I got the idea of converting the PDF form of the SOP to a webpage. So that is what I did. If you would like to see the completed SOP, click the link above. Now the the NCRPIS has a guide to use for the training of new employees.