With the California onion harvest slated to get under way in late April, shippers are anticipating the start of the deal with a great amount of optimism.

Cindy Elrod, a veteran onion saleswoman who sits on the desk at Peri & Sons Farms Inc. in Yerington, NV, told The Produce News in late March that a strong market was currently in play and all indications is that it will remain that way at least until California begins shipping.

With their own Nevada onion storage deal winding down, Elrod said March 23 that Peri & Sons would be sourcing onions for the next five weeks from various outside sources. The company’s Imperial Valley deal was expected to start up the last week of April.

She noted that South Texas, which is typically the top supplier of sweet onions nationwide during April, is down significantly in acreage, and the Northwest storage onion deal is also winding down.

“It looks like there is going to be minimal overlap between Mexico and South Texas,” she said.

Additionally, her sources said the Winter Garden/Uvalde district in Texas is going to have very light supplies because of hail damage when its onion crop matures in late April.

“It doesn’t look like Uvalde is going to be a factor this year,” she said.

Add it all together, and Elrod predicted “strong pricing in April and May.”

Kay Pricola, executive director of the Imperial Valley Vegetable Growers Association in El Centro, CA, said March 24 that her onion grower-members estimated that harvest would begin in about three weeks. She noted that an April 15 start date would be normal.

“Last year we started an onion festival here [in El Centro] on the first weekend of April and there were no onions,” she said. “This year we switched it to the last weekend of April and we think we might be in the middle of the harvest.”

Pricola said the deal is expected to last five to six weeks, depending upon the weather. The much-heralded El Niño has dumped some rain in the Imperial Valley, but the storms have been few and far between and have not caused any disruption, especially to the onion crop. Pricola said the acreage appears to be fairly normal, which would put it in the 10,000-acre range.

Production of organic onions is on the rise, according to the IVVGA executive, but it still only represents about 3 percent of the total acreage of that crop.

Pricola called it a “small trend” that is being aided by the Quantitative Settlement Agreement that was negotiated between the government and several Southern California water districts several years ago. The QSA calls for the Imperial Valley to fallow some of its land each year — based on a complicated formula — and divert the saved water to Los Angeles and San Diego.

The forced fallowing, Pricola said, has led some growers to use that time of non-production to begin the transition of the land to organic farming. As such, there has been a measurable increase in organic production of many Imperial Valley vegetable crops over the past several years.

Pricola said in 2014 there were only 224 acres of organic onions, but that number jumped 50 percent to 347 acres in 2015. The numbers for 2016 will not be made available until the year is complete, but Pricola said it looks like another increase in organic acreage has occurred.

In late March, she said that the crop looked good and farmers were optimistic about the prospects for a good season and good prices.

Imperial Valley should have onions through May, at which point the harvest will shift to the San Joaquin Valley in California. Central California had less acreage last year, largely because of the drought. Elrod said El Niño has delivered sufficient rain to that valley to the point that growers know they can make their crop.

Both the federal and state-managed water agencies have promised more water deliveries this year. Of course, the bar is very low as there was a zero allocation the last two years. This year the number is already up to 30 percent and that was before March roared in with twice the precipitation as an average year. Because of the improved irrigation prospects, Elrod expects San Joaquin Valley onion acreage to be greater than last year.