Dutch Crop tour weekend 11
Growing season is off to a bad start again for onion growers
For a while it seemed that the long wet period was giving way to spring, but that has now been forgotten given the recent precipitation. In various regions, in recent days it has mainly been a matter of fertilizing the grain and sporadically sowing and planting was possible. Given the gloomy weather forecast, growers are once again experiencing a false start to the new growing season.
Boerenbusiness is organizing again this year a Crop tour for potatoes and onions. During the growing season we monitor ten plots of yellow seed onions of various varieties and ten plots of French fry potatoes of the Innovator variety spread across the Netherlands. Although the participating growers would like to get off to a good start with agricultural work this season, this will remain very limited for the time being due to the persistent wet weather. Although it is only mid-March. It is still too early to plant Innovator, but this does not apply to crops such as seed onions. Various onion growers in the south of our country have stated that sowing the onions in mid-March was already possible regularly in the past. The soil was already skilled enough in those years. Now they don't have to think about it on the swampy ground, so the machinery will remain in the shed for the time being.
Sow far away for the time being
For the time being yes, because the drier period since the end of February has mainly resulted in the occasional sowing of some summer grain. Fertilizing the grain with the fertilizer spreader and sometimes the drag hose went better. A tour of the 10 onion plots of this Crop Tour shows that very limited sowing has been done. None of the growers have been in the field with the seed drill, while they have seen little or no action in the area. Jacky Dieleman from Philippine (Zeeuws-Vlaanderen) indicates that sowing is a long way off for the time being. In addition, time is quickly ticking for planting the onion onions. "We recently had many millimeters of rain again, which means we are not making any progress in drying the land. Sowing will have to wait a while, but I was hoping to plant the onion sets this week. It's about time "Planting alone is really no longer possible given the wet soil."
Also a little further north in Kortgene (Zeeland), onion grower Klaasjan Boer says that the weather and the soil were suitable for spreading fertilizer, but that sowing onions is also too much of a good thing for him. Boer also indicates that sowing onions in mid-March is normally a good time when spring permits. For example, he and several other growers sowed various plots in 2022 between March 12 and 17. In recent years, the average sowing date for the Crop Tour has been around the end of March to the first week of April, with the exception of last year. Then the average sowing date was April 24.
The northeast of the country is also always early to sow onions and that also applies this year: some plots have been sown there sporadically, partly because less rainfall has fallen in recent weeks compared to the center and south of the Netherlands. This concerns a very limited number of hectares that have been sown.
False start
It is too early to say that this spring will be the same as 2023, but growers indicate that sowing onions until the first week of April is probably not possible given the current weather forecasts. It's very wet. The ground temperature should also increase in the coming weeks. This means that there is absolutely no early and smooth sowing and the growing season gets off to a false start.
Jesse Torringa
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