A perfect keyhole is seared into the treeline buffering Interstate 93 as it enters Concord, a wreath of roadside vegetation framing the city like a thumbprint.
Through it, motorists’ picture of Sunfox Farm mutates with the seasons.
Grass blankets the farm during spring. Owners Amber and Greg Pollock plant in June, and by July, their juvenile sunflowers have formed a leafy understory. For a whisper in August, just one week, they bloom with vigor. Oil swells their seeds in late summer. The flowers bow their yellow crowns under the weight before they’re harvested. By the beginning of November, the life cycle is complete, and the farm recedes from public view.
Sunflowers stretch skyward, droop and die in a matter of months. But the farm, although blotted from view, does not become dormant with them. The flowers’ oil, not their ephemeral beauty, becomes their product.
“We’re processing all throughout the year, small batches all throughout,” said Amber Pollock. Her husband had just run out barefoot to shoo away a groundhog from their fledgling sunflower plants. “As soon as people try it, they taste it and utilize it in their food, they realize that it’s something really special. Once we build that connection, then we have some pretty diehard fans out there,” he added.
The Pollocks’ sunflower oil is cold-pressed and unrefined, and the couple takes pains on their website and in-person to disentangle their product from the knot of controversy that follows seed oils at large. Traditional sunflower oil is abundant in linoleic acid, an essential omega-6 fatty acid that can contribute to a reduced risk of coronary heart disease in moderate quantities. But it can also provoke inflammation and metabolic disease when it is exposed to high heat during the cooking process and oxidizes. The couple compares their sunflower oil to olive oil, with its concentration of highly heat-resistant oleic acid.
The considerations begin at harvest. Seeds full of oil are hauled to the Pollocks’ home base in Deerfield where they are dried, cleaned and screened for impurities, before the oil is pressed into a 30-gallon barrel. From there, it is filtered and bottled.
“In the process itself of growing, we’re not using any chemical herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers; all non-GMO,” said Amber. “Every step is, you know, trying to make a healthy product that we would want our family to eat.”
In June, Sunfox Farm’s sunflower oil won a Good Food Award, an accolade based on blind taste tests and an assessment of producers’ environmental and social practices. The farm was the only producer in New Hampshire to receive recognition in the nationwide competition this year.
“They want to learn if you’re good people as well as producing good food,” Amber said. “It was a fun process.”
The landscape parallel to I-93 stoops into a valley, which is where the Pollocks’ domain begins, tucked discreetly behind a strip mall on Loudon Road, home to a TJ Maxx and a Rocky’s Ace Hardware.
Their 60 acres, strictly speaking, belong to the city of Concord, and the city, they said, has been supportive of their growth. The farm is part of six parcels totaling 114 acres known as the Gully Hill Conservation Land, which came into the city’s possession over a series of purchases from local families between 2007 and 2012. The sales were conditional on the city leasing the land back to the families, according to history provided by city spokesperson Stefanie Breton.
When farmer Keith Richards notified the city he planned to retire from farming in 2016, the city began looking for new tenants. The land briefly served as home to Sloping Acres Farm before Sunfox Farm won a request for proposals process in 2023.
The business has only grown since, literally and figuratively.
Sunfox Farm is entering its fourth sunflower season and will be hosting Sunflower Fest August 8-16. Amber, who holds degrees in culinary arts and clinical dietetics, hosts farm-to-table dinners each year, shading guests under a pergola enclosed on all sides by walls of sunflowers.
Fifty retailers now sell the couple’s sunflower oil, and they’ve begun expanding into dressings and marinades, natural bug repellent and personal care items, like body butters and lip balms.
In June, they traded the field for New York City, where Good Food held its award ceremony. Work needed to be done back home, but family and workers picked up the slack to allow them to attend.
“So, Market Days was our employee, Jeff. Amber’s parents did the Concord farmers market, and my dad did the other farmers market,” Greg said.
“We have a great group, great family and friends for sure,” Amber said.
A bumper sticker planted on the back of the truck borrows from John Denver and announces gender-agnostically, “Thank God, I’m a country boy.” Amber continues to work part-time as a diesel mechanic at a local tractor dealership, but eventually, they’re working towards committing themselves full-time to the farm.
Their lease with the city lasts another two decades and needs to be renewed every five years.
“By that point, we hope that we’ll be such a quintessential part of Concord that no one will want to see us go. We hope to spend our careers here,” Greg said.
“They call themselves the sunflower city now,” Amber added, repeating the phrase she hears from city officials every summer. “They’ve really taken to it.”
