By Faith Peppers
University of
Georgia

If you just couldn’t find the right gift for Mother’s Day, skip
the diamonds and pearls. Georgia’s Vidalia onions are plentiful
and affordable this year and, oh, so practical.

The big picture for Vidalia onions this year “is bumper yields,
great quality and a lot of onions to move,” said Reid Torrance,
the University of Georgia Cooperative Extension coordinator in
Tattnall County, in the heart of the Vidalia growing region.

“There are plenty to go around,” he said, “so buy some for your
mother for Mother’s Day.”

Torrance said the Vidalia onion crop may be the biggest
ever. “It may be a new record,” he said. “If it’s not a record
per-acre yield, it will be very close.”

Based on historical averages minus disaster years, a typical
per-acre yield is around 200 hundredweight, or 20,000
pounds. “Around 240 to 260 hundredweight is our high,” Torrance
said, “and we’ll be in that range.”

Good weather and good science account for the bumper crop.

“Our yields have been up 20 to 25 percent or more in the past
few years due to new varieties,” Torrance said. “We’re about
four weeks into the harvest, and the final number for this year
will all depend on the weather. The overcast weather we’ve had
is a good thing for us. If it starts getting really hot, these
onions in the field aren’t going to last.”

About half of the crop is already harvested, much of which will
go into storage. “Movement (from the field to the store) has
been slower for a lot of people this year than a typical year,”
he said.

“We’ve sold about 20 percent of what we’ve made so far,” he
said. “We’re just trying to get them out of the field as fast
as we can.”

Vidalia onions burst onto the fresh-produce scene in the early
1930s. The growing region was on a main thoroughfare for
tourists going to Florida, and word about these exceptionally
sweet onions quickly spread, creating demand in northern
markets.

Competition for the sweet onion market continues to grow.

“Demand has been good, but we’re a little bit perplexed as to
why movement has been so slow,” Torrance said. “We’ve been
getting the bigger yields, and our market window is getting
earlier and overlapping with the Texas sweet onions. And there
has been some talk about high fuel prices impacting
movement.”

International competitors have also entered the market. “The
stuff out of Chile and Peru really is in a different season,”
Torrance explained. “It impacts our sales out of storage when
they start coming in in September. So we really don’t want to
sell onions past September, because you’re competing for the
limited shelf space allotted for sweet onions.”

For the sweet onion market, timing is everything.

“Certainly, I think our market window is getting a little too
early,” he said. “What I’d really like to see are some later-
maturing varieties that have real good quality.”

(Faith Peppers is a news editor for the University of
Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.)