Crop tour onions - week 36
First fields in the swath, lifting conditions good
The first yellow seed onions of the Boerenbusiness Crop tour lying in the swath. The harvesting conditions were good. Due to the high temperature weather, the onions will be on land for a while.
September has now arrived, but so far only a limited area of seed onions has been lifted in the Netherlands. Due to the later sowing and the special course of this growing season, the onions are ready much later than other years. This also applies to the Gewastour, where the first two onion plots have only been lifted in recent days. The grubbing up is also planned for the other plots soon.
Good harvesting conditions
Last Saturday (September 2) the first plot of the Gewastour was lifted in Lepelstraat in North Brabant. Onion grower David White says that the plot had gradually been leveled and had been leveled for a while. Because the top layer of the soil was still soft, the harvest went very well. "The lifting went fantastic now and in a few days the soil will be a lot harder again. At the end of the day you already noticed that it had become drier compared to when we started lifting. The crop had already died quite a bit , only a very small part does not. Do you just have to wait for that?"
Ironing many plots is difficult and heterogeneous, but the plot in Lepelstraat gradually fell into the ground. "I think it started to iron out so gradually and on time because we were able to sow relatively earlier (April 21). We also had a good turnout and a thick stand, which resulted in thinner necks." De Wit also mentions irrigation as one of the reasons. "We irrigated quite a bit of foliage at the beginning of the growing season. You bring forward your crop in the beginning, that should not be forgotten either." In terms of yield, according to De Wit, it will be somewhere between 50 and 60 tons gross.
Although the onions are already in the windrow, the destination of these onions is still unknown. "We are still unsure whether we will sell them off the land or put them in storage. We will dry them in the swath for a while and see what is possible".
Waiting for cooler weather
Yellow onions were also lifted in Zeewolde on Tuesday 5 September. Here too, the harvesting conditions were now good and significantly less so later this week. Grower Jan Berend Biesheuvel indicates that a large portion of the onions had been ironed for quite some time. The onions that were still standing proud, soon seemed to stop growing, according to Biesheuvel.
It is difficult to estimate the yield. "I don't know what the yield will be like. I haven't sampled anything in the plot yet. They all go into the shed," says Biesheuvel. That storage will have to wait for a while, given the current weather. "The temperature will remain high all week, so we won't be able to get the onions off the land. As it seems now, even Monday is predicted to be 30 degrees. Then it will probably not be until next week."
Jesse Torringa
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