Delbert Bland, owner of Bland Farms LLC of Glennville, GA, and a year-round, worldwide onion producer, foresees tight supplies but excellent markets for this year’s Peruvian crop.

“In Peru this year our crop’s about 20 percent less because it’s been so warm,” Mr. Bland said. “It’s making a difference with the supply, too. Supplies are fairly tight down there.”

That tightening up means retailers and even entire countries will be competing for portions of the Peruvian crop, meaning “the market’s going to very good, strong all the way through,” Delbert and Troy Bland at the Produce Marketing Association Fresh Summit in Atlanta last fall. (Photo by Chip Carter)Mr. Bland said.

Yields are off and this year’s crop will see more mediums than usual, though the overall bulb size will be roughly the same as an average year.

“We’ve had a lot of heat and it’s caused the crop not to come off as plentiful as it normally does. We normally make about 2.5 containers per hectare; now we’re 1.5 to 1.75,” Mr. Bland said. One hectare equals 2.47 acres.

The difference in onion size will not be noticeable to consumers, but when it comes to size and yield, producers will lose “a little bit of both. You won’t tell any difference as far as the end result on the shelf. The size is not that much different. I’d say the percentage of mediums, there’s a little more increase than what it normally it is, a 10 percent increase I’d guess,” Mr. Bland said.

That could make competition even more fierce for Peruvian onions because the neighboring “Colombians, that’s all they want, so there’s a lot of demand for those onions,” he said.

While tighter supplies mean higher profits, the decrease in yields takes some of the fun out of Mr. Bland’s job.

“It’s a difficult time when you’re a marketer and you’re running tight on supplies. It makes it hard to get out and do your job,” Mr. Bland said. “The best job you can do is have more product than what you can sell and work hard to get rid of it. You just keep going. But we’ve got our regular customer base covered — we just won’t be able to get out and solicit new customers.”

Mr. Bland faced a similar situation this spring when downy mildew took a good-sized bite out of the Vidalia crop.

“The Vidalia market was very good. We came out OK in the end because the supply was down like 25 percent and I foresee the Peru deal as almost a mirror image of that,” Mr. Bland said. “It’s not because of disease, it’s because of the heat. Normally when you harvest onions in Peru you’ll have 40-50 percent colossals sometimes; this year you may have 10 percent. It’s not like we have a shortage of any particular size — we’ve just got an overall shortage on the yield.”

Wherever the crops come from, “it takes a lot to make them work, especially when you’re doing your own growing — it’s a pretty good challenge,” Mr. Bland said.