The Great Onion Harvest of 2024
Weather dictates so much of farming, especially harvests. Last week was one of those weeks where, despite other pressing harvests on the docket, the weather forced our hand and we needed to switch gears and get all hands on deck for the onion harvest before the rains came.
Our onion crop this year is pretty hefty – we had about 13 beds of onions including sweet, yellow, and red onions as well as shallots. These beauties were all seeded in February and transplanted in April, and after 7 long months of life, they were large and starting develop those lovely papery layers that mean they are ready to cure and be stored. We had been incrementally harvesting the sweet and red onions for the past couple weeks using a harvesting strategy we call “hunt & peck,” meaning we walk through the beds and find the correct sizes for bunching or individual sale and leave ones that aren’t quite ready for future harvests. The combination of the onions’ maturity and the upcoming forecast of rain meant bad news – the potential for the onions to re-root in the soil, causing them to start growing once again, causing them to split and likely rot. This meant, if we were to leave the onions in the ground, our beautiful, perfect onions (thousands of pounds of perfect onions) would be unsellable. We deliberated for a while, should we or shouldn’t we harvest them now? Do we want to risk it? A decision was finally made – it was now or never.
So, on a cloudy Wednesday morning, a 14-member crew set out on Operation: Get All The Onions Out of the Ground Before the Rain Comes. We were determined, quick, and organized – truly a well-oiled onion harvesting machine. Here’s how we got thousands of pounds of onions out of the ground in 3 hours: Firstly, we needed macro bins. Macro bins are large harvest containers that can hold around 1,500 lbs of produce, can be forklifted around by tractors, and are able to be stacked on each other. Throughout the morning, it was one person’s job to constantly deliver empty macro bins out to the field for the team to fill with onions.
Most people pulled up onions from the ground, methodically moving through the bed to ensure no onions were left behind. We built small piles of onions in the field that were easy to scoop up and load into the macro bins.
Two people operated tractors that held macro bins, driving slowly down the length of each bed while a team of 2-3 people picked up the piles of onions and delicately laid them in the macros until they were full. Rinse & repeat.
We knew we needed to finish by the early afternoon before the rain came, and we were able to get 18 macros of onions harvested, loaded, and protected from the rain in three hours. We celebrated with a brief ABBA dance party while chucking away rotten reject onions like we were Olympic shot putters.
Want to try our onions? We are currently selling sweet and red onions in our Farmstand. Come try them and keep your eyes peeled for yellow onions and shallots, available soon.
~Flynn