I’ve got about 50 acres I plan to plant in winter wheat the middle of Sept next year. Once the wheat dies off in the spring, do sunflowers usually come up without any additional plowing?

I always found a winter plowing, like January, helped the sunflowers.

assuming you had standing native sunflowers in your field, they will do best when you disc the field in January or February. Growing winter wheat and sunflowers aren’t really compatible. Maybe dedicate a portion to wheat and a portion to sunflowers.

We have a couple of 2-3 acre fields we plant in wheat every fall. Sunflowers come up every year with spring rains.

We split our cultivation field for this purpose. Sunflowers barely still standing now but will be plowed under in January-February. We have oats but same concept.

....but we never had a bird in the sunflowers until November cold fronts hit and now there’s a couple hundred of them amongst the standing sunflowers. And the oats barely had enough rain to germinate and are now about done from the deer hammering them. Sometimes Mother Nature doesn’t cooperate but it’s always fun to try a new approach to hunting the same ol property.

Depends on the rain. If it rains in the fall and winter and your wheat grows well and heads out it will keep the sunflowers choked out. If it is a dry fall and winter and wet spring and early summer the sunflowers will grow.
Either way you get a good dove crop.

I do this to about 60 acres and have for many years. I've tried it 2 different ways. I've left the cows off it for the wheat seed to make for Dove hunting, didn't work. As soon as it headed out the Hogs and Deer ate all the heads off, no seeds. As soon as deer season is over I turn Cows in on it, the cows eat most of the wheat and they disturb the ground enough that sunflowers come up in the Spring.

Bottom line, if you want sunflowers in your wheat field let the cows graze it as soon as deer season is over. If you don't graze it, the wheat chokes out the sunflowers and the ground is not disturbed enough by deer and pigs to get the sunflowers up.

They will come up later than fields turned in January, those fields start coming up in late March. Grazed wheat fields seem to come up more in May, and it depends on late spring and summer rains.