Dorn Cox looks out over a field of sunflowers, their heads bending with the weight of millions of tiny seeds ripe for harvest. Soon he will mow down the flowers and feed the seeds into a press to extract their oils - oils he will then turn into fuel for the tractors and trucks on his family's Lee farm.

"These four acres of sunflowers will yield 500 gallons of biodiesel," said Cox, a 34-year-old organic farmer who is working with the University of New Hampshire on the experimental sunflower-to-fuel project. "It's about a dollar a gallon to produce it."

Cox has been making biodiesel for three years from used vegetable oil he gets from the university dining hall. A Cornell graduate in international agricultural and world economy, he built a rig that distills the vegetable oil into fuel.

This winter, he traveled to Argentina where he saw a new phenomenon - farmers and large companies using a similar method to make fuel from sunflower seeds. Because the economy in Argentina depends more heavily on farming and sources of petroleum-based fuels are less reliable than in the Unites States, more people are already heavily tapping natural oils to make fuel, he said.

His trip inspired him to give the sunflower method a try. When he returned, he partnered with the UNH Cooperative Extension to plant five kinds of sunflowers at the university's Kingman Farm in Madbury. This fall he will take the seeds to his farm a mile down the road in Lee where he will test which kinds are best for making biodiesel.

He plans to test which types of sunflowers produce the highest quality and quantity of oil and have the highest nutritional content in the seeds. The leftovers from the pressing process - crushed bits of seeds that look like cornflakes and are called cakes - will be used for animal feed.

He is nearly done piecing together the machinery he needs to convert oil from the sunflowers into biofuel. The oil is mixed with some of the same chemicals used at tanneries to create a chemical reaction with a byproduct of biodiesel. Like brewing beer or distilling liquor, it has to be refined several times before the final product is reached.

Cox is building his rig on a flat-bed trailer so he can haul it around to county fairs and other events to help spread the word about biofuels. It is run by a generator fueled by biodiesel and the pumps for moving fuel from one distillation tank to another will be powered by compressed air to eliminate the need for electricity.

"It's totally self-contained - no emissions,"he said.

The idea is to make it as efficient and environmentally friendly as possible, he said.

Cox grew up on the farm just off Route 155 in Lee where his family grows hay, harvests timber, keeps high-bush blueberries and raises grass-fed livestock. He produces roughly 3,000 gallons of biodiesel a year for the farm equipment there. The fuel can power any diesel engine. The only modification that needs to be made to the farm equipment is natural rubber fuel lines must be replaced with metal.

When Cox first got interested in biodiesel, it was mainly a grassroots movement, he said. Now, it's becoming big business. Since oil prices climbed past $70 a barrel this year, more farmers and businesses in the United States are switching to biofuels.

"I've definitely noticed a difference," he said. "(Three years ago) it was not commercially available and there were no local producers."

There are more than 800 biodiesel fuel pumps in the United States, according to the National BioDiesel Board based in Missouri. Those pumps sold 75 million gallons of biodiesel in 2005, triple the number of gallons sold the year before, the board reports.

In New Hampshire, several oil companies offer biodiesel to fuel cars or heat homes.

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