Welasco, Texas
May 12, 2008
A glut of stored onions left over
from last year has soured market prices for sweet onion growers
in South Texas now harvesting the last of an exceptional crop,
experts say.
“We were able to almost double our normal yields per acre with
picture-perfect onions, but market prices are so low this year,
growers will be lucky to break even,” said Dr. Juan Anciso, a
vegetable specialist with
Texas AgriLife
Extension Service in Weslaco.
“Unfortunately, an abundance of cold storage onions harvested
late last year in the northwest states of the country continued
selling into late April at very low prices. That hurt demand and
weakened prices,” he said.
Stored onions have been fetching $3.50 to $4 per 50-pound bags,
dropping what South Texas growers get for their fresh, sweet
onions to $5 to $6 per bag, which are barely break-even prices.
“We can’t compete with stored onion prices,” Anciso said. “Yes,
our onions are of higher quality, but not so good as to justify
doubling the price of the stored onions. Buyers will go with the
lower, stored-onion prices.” South Texas onions are planted in
the fall and produce the country’s first bulbs, usually a
favorable marketing window. Harvesting here begins in mid-March,
peaks in April and drops off by mid-May, when stored onions are
usually long gone. But the glut this year even cut into Mexico’s
U.S. market.
“Mexico also had trouble,” Anciso said. “They usually ship from
January through April, but prices were so low this year, they
quit their normal shipments to the U.S. in February because they
couldn’t economically justify the cost of transporting them from
the Tampico area, where most of them are grown, to the U.S.
border.”
The weak market prevented South Texas growers from cashing in on
a crop of exceptional yields and quality, Anciso said.
“We almost doubled our per-acre yields,” he said. “We usually
produce about 500, 50-pound bags per acre. This year we got
between 800 and 1,100 bags per acre.”
Favorable weather helped boost output, but other factors not so
obvious also helped, Anciso said.
“Onions like the dry weather we’ve had because it reduces the
foliar and fungal diseases that hurt onions,” he said. “Dry
weather usually favors thrips, which are onion’s worst insect
pests, but for some reason, they were non-existent.
“This should have been our worst thrips year ever, but there
were hardly any,” Anciso said. “We didn’t have a harsh winter to
knock back those populations, so I can’t explain why we didn’t
have major thrips problems.”
South Texas sweet onions have been a mainstay of the state’s
vegetable production, but acreage here has been dwindling the
last few years.
Some 9,000 acres were planted in the Rio Grande Valley this
year, compared to almost 11,000 last year. Onion acreage for the
entire South Texas region, including the Coastal Bend and the
Laredo Winter Garden areas, is also down by several thousand
acres, according to the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistical
Service.
Competition, the threat of a labor shortage and other factors
are to blame, according to John McClung, president of Texas
Producers Association in Mission.
“So many onions are produced in so many areas of the world now
that it’s difficult to make money on onions,” McClung said.
“Weather, water and labor issues all contribute to what farmers
use in calculating how many acres they’re going to plant.”
Available labor is an especially important consideration for
onion growers since sweet onions are hand-harvested, often by
farmworkers with questionable immigration statuses, he said.
“Hot onions can be harvested mechanically,” said McClung, “but
we do better with mild onions which have a low acid content and
high moisture levels, which means they are soft. We have not yet
found equipment that will harvest soft onions without doing
excessive damage to them.”
Without adequate machines to do the work, McClung said threats
of a government crackdown on illegal immigrant farmworkers also
cut into onion acreage.
“The labor situation is confused,” he said. “The federal
government had said that letters to growers with employees whose
names didn’t match Social Security numbers would be going out
last winter.
“There were legal challenges to that and those letters never
went out,” McClung said. “Had they gone out, that would have
forced growers to either explain that the government had made a
mistake or fire employees who may have been using someone else’s
Social Security numbers.”
Had those letters gone out, McClung said, the labor shortage
would have been worse than it is now.
“Harvesting will continue through July 15 in the Winter Garden
area (south of San Antonio), so for this year, I guess we’re OK,
labor-wise. But that situation and low market prices reduced
planting intentions.” |
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