‘Phenomenal quality for early onions’ at Owyhee Produce
‘Phenomenal quality for early onions’ at Owyhee Produce
First loads of new-crop direct-seeded Spanish Sweets started shipping Aug. 4 for Owyhee Produce in Nyssa, OR, and company General Manager Shay Myers said the onions have developed well with a good profile.
“The wild card at this time,” he said Sept. 4, “is when and how many will go into storage.”
Myers said the Aug. 4 start is not the earliest for Owyhee, but it was about a week early for direct-seeded.
“We are seeing phenomenal quality for early onions,” he said. “We have a good size profile and skin quality. It’s really as good as we’ve ever had.”
The third-generation onion man was quick to give credit where credit’s due: “It has more to do with Mother Nature. We’d like to take the credit, but that wouldn’t be appropriate.”
The remainder of the crop should be in storage by Oct. 10.
“We started lifting storage onions on Sept. 3, and we still have lots of acreage to harvest,” he said.
Owyhee has some 80 percent of its fields under drip irrigation, a method Myers said helped with several weeks of excessive heat in June and July.
“But we’ve also been doing it for more than 15 years,” he noted.
Retail makes up the biggest market segment for Owyhee Produce, and Myers expects 800,000 to 1.1 million units to be shipped this season.
Yellows are the mainstay color, although he said red demand has increased, and demand for whites has dropped off somewhat.
“There is more demand for reds than we’ve ever seen — up about 40 percent,” Myers said.
The company added refrigerated cold storage for 7.5 million pounds this year, which Myers said will improve quality and provide product through the end of May.
“Our goal with this project is to avoid the volatility of supply that seems to appear every year between April 15 and June 1. It is not that there aren’t onions during that time; it is just less consistent than buying from here in Eastern Oregon, and it’s something our customers have been asking us to do.”
Last year the growing operation, Froerer Farms, began using a vacuum planter that not only lays down straight lines of spaced seeds but also places drip lines for irrigation. The lines are housed on white rotating cylinders on the planter.
Myers said technological upgrades also include live GPS and temperature recording that allow customers to “track their loads 24/7.”
