9-27 FB Sid's Onions

  The harvest is beginning in the red and yellow onion fields. I had a chat with Sid Freeman the other day and we discussed his onion crop. Sid did very well last year with onions but this year things have changed a little bit. The market is down a little bit from what I have been told by my brokers. 25 pound bags of reds are running $6.25 right now and last year at this time they were running somewhere around $9. How do you explain the drop? I think primarily an oversupply. They were a good price last year and overall there are a few more onion acres out there. They are more of a specialty type onion because of the color, they are a decorative type onion on the plate. They are not used for a lot of processing like the yellows are, therefore there is just not that big a demand. Reds are a little harder to produce, I don’t know if that has anything to do with the market or not, but there just aren’t that many ribs out there and not that big of a demand so a small increase in the amount of reds can drop the market off significantly.