Experienced onion growers are returning to previously shunned ‘local’ onion seeds for their smaller size, which is preferred by buyers for home cooking, and for their low production cost.
According to Starke Ayres Kenya’s managing director Josphat Njoroge, the country’s onion seed market in the last few years has gone from being made of 90 per cent local or open-pollinated onion varieties (OPVs) to 70 per cent hybrid onions. The reason for this he explained is a simple one; hybrid onions can produce more than double the tonnage of onions that OPV onions produce. With most Kenyan farmers working on under five acres of land, at times with as little as a quarter of an acre, they must maximise their yield.
Boniface Kilu who through his company Bonik Agri-solutions has been contracted to farm onions for over a decade throughout Kenya and even in Tanzania has in time gone back to mainly growing local varieties.
“With proper farming practices, I can grow an acre of local onions with just Sh50,000. For hybrids, I’ll have to spend up to Sh150,000. Well-cured OPV onions will always have a ready market thanks to their ideal medium size and abundant flavoure as is evidenced by Kenya, Ethiopia, and South Sudan’s unquenching thirst for Tanzanias’ local Mangola onions. The extra tonne, or even four, is often not worth the extra production cost,” Kilu said.
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Unlike hybrid onions, OPVs are produced through open cross-pollination with onions of the same variety. They produce medium-sized onions and include varieties such as the popular Bombay red distributed by East Africa seeds and Red Creole distributed by Continental as well as Mang’ola red which gets its name from the famous Mang’ola Ward in Arusha which is perhaps the largest producer and supplier of onions in East Africa, and finally the much-vaunted Super Yali distributed by Dryland Seed.
These seeds are up to eight times cheaper than hybrids. A one-kilogram pack of OPV onions costs about Sh5,000 while a similar pack of hybrids costs Sh35,000. While a one-kilogram packet of hybrid onions contains exactly 250,000 seeds, OPVs contain over 300,000 seeds as they are ‘packed to fill’.
Hybrid seeds however have OPV seeds beat in germination percentages and growth time.
Up to 95 per cent of the seeds germinate, compared to 75 per cent for local seeds. For knowledgeable farmers, however, this gap in germination rates is breached by breaking the seed dormancy of local seeds before planting them in a nursery and then heavily watering them in the first two weeks.
Hybrid onion seeds take 2½ to three months to mature while OPV seeds take three to four months depending on how well they are managed.
While local varieties can be grown without any pesticides or inorganic fertiliser, an acre of OPV onions can hit seven to nine tons with just 150 kilograms of fertiliser. Hybrid onions for their part require at least 450kg of fertiliser per acre.
Kilu describes OPVs as ‘white onions’ as they are not adapted to local growing conditions and require plenty of TLC. They are however explosive in their yield potential. While Boniface usually targets nine to eleven tons in yield, you will see farmers often posting 20 tons per acre harvests online.
While a harvest of 20 tonnes from an acre of hybrid onions is a major cash windfall, there is one major caveat; the market. “People are awestruck when they see a farmer get 20 tonnes of onions from an acre. If you contract me to farm onions for you with a 20-ton per acre target, I assure you, with four 50Kg bags of fertiliser and fairly fertile soil, almost every onion that comes out of the ground will be 0.2 to 0.4 kilograms and three to six bulbs will hit a kilogram on the weighing scale. I will get my commission, but if the farmer does not have an already preplanned market for large bulbed onions, they will likely be left with big beautiful onions without much of a market for them,” the agronomist explained.
Boniface cautioned farmers that while a bigger tonnage per acre should ideally translate to more profits, in a market where most of the consumers, brokers, and mama mbogas will go for smaller onion bulbs it often does not.
“Schools, hotels, hospitals, these are your key markets for large onions. But ‘institutions’ make up about 30 per cent of the Kenyan onion market with the majority of onions being consumed by households,” he said.
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However, farmers who can access these markets are in a position to make twice as much as getting bigger-sized bulbs only requires the application of several rounds of potassium foliar fertiliser.
The agronomist who is currently handling a 30-acre onion project in Malindi grows one kilogram of local seeds for half a kilogram of hybrids. To get the best quality seeds he advises farmers to go directly to their distributor’s stations and avoid agrovets who often stock close to expiring OPV seeds.
Bonik Agri-solutions: 0790151713