The Scenic Rim will be Queensland's tourist mecca next weekend as thousands of sunflower worshippers descend on the region.
The Kalbar Sunflower Festival is a celebration of the crop hosted on the outskirts of the historic township of Kalbar.
In 2021, Lucerne farmers Jenny and Russell Jenner saw an opportunity to diversify into agritourism after being heavily impacted by years of drought - they had also witnessed the region's farmers frustrated with "selfie-crazed tourists" traipsing uninvited through sunflower crops for a photo.
The Kalbar Sunflower Festival was born - but little did they know it would grow into an agricultural event that sells out faster than an Ed Sheeran concert.
"This event has blown our mind in how popular it is," Ms Jenner said.
"The pre-sale tickets sold out in about the first 5 minutes, that's 5000 tickets, then when the general public tickets went on sale it actually crashed the system.
"We only had 12,000 tickets to sell and they sold out straight away and we have 14,000 people on a wait list for tickets now."
The three-day event invites visitors to stroll through sunflowers on the couple's property while taking part in a variety of activities and entertainment, including arts, crafts, music, dining, a sunflower maze and a pick-your-own patch.
Ms Jenner said the Sunflower Festival was an important way of raising awareness of the farming district's food production and injects money into the local economy.
"Kalbar is known for its carrots and lots of other vegetables and we have the Scenic Rim Eat Local Month, so agritourism is pretty important to this area," she said.
"We support local businesses when we hold this festival and they are very appreciative, the money spent in this area from having that large number of people come for a weekend is huge.
"The Scenic Rim is such an attractive area for people to come and visit, most of the visitors come from Brisbane and they stay and book accommodation and they visit all our amazing places."
Creating a crop of sunflowers timed to perfectly bloom for the festival is a difficult process and the couple use their years of horticultural knowledge and call in a few experts to help.
"This year we planted one million sunflowers," she said.
"We work closely with our local Elders team agronomists to get that perfect flower, because that's what it's all about for the people that come to visit and we have grown them closer together this year so the stems aren't as thick.
"The timing is very difficult, we have an agricultural company called Metagen in Gatton and they supply us with products that fruit growers use to make everything come out at the right time."
Planning regulations keep festival focused
The sunflowers will bloom on the farm for several weeks, but Ms Jenner said they had to enforce strict guidelines around access to the property to meet their planning permits.
"We are restricted from planning issues because we are zoned 'agriculture' not 'tourism', we can't operate the farm and have people here all the time," she said.
"This event is run under a temporary event permit for 3 days, so the hard part is when people keep coming and that does become a problem on our country roads and unfortunately we have to mulch the flowers because we just are not permitted to have people coming here all the time.
"So all our efforts go into the one event a year and we make that really special for people."
The Kalbar Sunflower Festival is on March 10, 11, and 12, 2023 and helps raise funds for Scenic Rim not-for-profit organisations and the Cancer Council.
