They aren’t even thinking about celebrating yet in Vidalia onion
country. The last days
of winter, and even the first of spring, have dealt some cruel
blows to this sweet
Georgia crop before.

But growers are starting to feel hopeful of a happy harvest in
another month or so.

“The crop is looking very good this year,” said George Boyhan, a
vegetable crops
horticulturist with the University of Georgia Extension
Service.

“There hasn’t been any significant weather damage,” he said as
the crop headed into
the last two weeks of winter.

Boyhan said the only problems he’s seen in the crop are minor.

“I’ve seen a few fields with a little botrytis (neck rot),” he
said. “But it’s mostly on the
foliage. It can cause some problems at harvest if it moves down
into the onion. But
normal spraying programs should easily control it, if the
weather cooperates.”

And so far, the weather has done just that, although the early
arrival of spring may
have many growers nervous. A late hard freeze, like the one that
cost them millions of
dollars last year, could greatly damage the current crop of
onions.

Growers have a lot at stake, Boyhan said.

“I don’t think we know exactly how many acres of Vidalia onions
are out there,” he
said. “But I think it’s comparable to what was planted last
year — somewhere around
16,000 to 18,000 acres.”

The Vidalia onion crop has grown greatly from about 700 acres in
the mid-1970s. Most
of the growth, Boyhan said, has been in the past decade or so.

Growers have been able to expand the acreage they plant, he
said, mainly because of
three major trends:

* Controlled-atmosphere (CA) storage allows onions to be stored
up to eight months.
The facilities are costly to build but have greatly expanded the
Vidalia onion market.

CA storage has been good for the sweet onions’ quality,
too. “Growers have to have a
higher-quality product going into storage,” Boyhan said. “If you
put an inferior onion
into storage, you’ll have serious problems coming out of it.”

* Growers, especially those with the bigger farms, are
increasingly selling their own
onions. They’re using a number of creative ways to direct-market
their sweet crop.

* With the retail sales are coming a growing number of value-
added products. Onion
growers are processing onions into such things as relishes and
flash-frozen onion rings
and chopped onions.

Growers are also looking into processing carrots and other
vegetable crops.

“They have these expensive facilities to process onions,” Boyhan
said. “They’re
looking for other ways to use them beyond that one time of the
year.”

They’re selling such sweet spinoffs as Vidalia salad onions,
too.

“Those are early-planted onions growers harvest and market when
they’re an
inch-and-a-half to two inches in diameter,” he said. “It’s a
tiny percentage of the crop.”

The salad onions make up just one more facet of the fast-
expanding world of Vidalia
onions. “It’s very much a business that has come into its own
over the past few years,”
he said.

Boyhan had a ready reason for all that growth. “Well,” he said,
smiling, “it IS the
sweetest onion out there.”