10-20 IAN Sid's Onions

 The Idaho Onion harvest recently wrapped up. Farmers say prices were good and quality excellent despite the crop coming in two weeks late.??Idaho onion acres that were harvested were up 3 percent. Idaho growers expect to harvest 9100 acres of onions in 2010, up 3 percent from last year, according to the USDA. Sid Freeman produces a number of different crops but has 45 acres in mostly yellow onions and figures to make a pretty good profit. We had a conversation in his field and here is an assortment of his remarks (please forgive the wind noise in the mike).

“Yellow onions are full of vitamins and they’ll make you healthy. Make your salads taste better. We’ve topped these onions and set ‘em into wind rows. That machine loads the onions onto trucks. We’ll haul ‘em to the packing shed. My onions are headed over to Partner’s Produce and may end up at Costco. We’ll end up a thousand dollars in the red…I mean black.”