Onion World: The Voice of the Onion Industry

Higher Dollar Hurting Canadian Growers

Onion World
November 2007

by Myron Love

Growing conditions across Canada for onions were ideal this year but the renewed strength of the Canadian dollar verses its United States counterpart and lower commodity prices in the U.S. have
combined to take a big bite out of Canadian producers’ bottom lines.

“The exchange rate is killing us,” says Wayne Rempel of Kroeker Farms, the province of Manitoba’s largest onion grower. “We’re getting $4 for a 50 lb. bag of jumbos, half of what we were getting
last year. In Washington state, growers are selling jumbos for $2 a bag.”

Jim Veri of Exeter Produce in Ontario concurs that there has been downward pressure on the market.

“Our growers are receiving about $4 a bushel,” he says. The problem is exacerbated, both Veri and Rempel note, by the strong reliance of Canadian onion producers on exports to American customers. The Canadian dollar being on par with its American cousin for the first time in about 30 years has removed the price incentive for buying Canadian while the high cost of oil has boosted freight rates.

About the only onion growers who are unaffected by the new exchange rate are the half dozen producers in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Earl Kidston, a grower in the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia, notes that the majority of onions grown in the region is for domestic consumption. Maritime growers also send some of their onions to the Caribbean.

Kidston estimates that there were about 500 acres onions planted in the region, most yellows.

“We had an average yield this year after a poor harvest last year,” he says. “And our prices were about the same.”

The bulk of Canada’s onion growers are in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. The more than 300 Ontario onion growers are concentrated in two main regions: the Bradford area just north of
Toronto and the Hollow Marsh area south of Georgian Bay to the west. Exeter Produce markets onions from the Bradford area.

Veri reports that 3,500-4,000 acres of cooking onions (mostly yellows) were planted in the Bradford region this past season, a figure about the same as last year.

“We enjoyed an extended growing season,” Veri says. “We had above average temperatures and dry conditions well into the fall.”

This year’s yields, 800-1,000 bushels per acre, were about the same as last year, he notes. About 75 percent of the crop is exported to the U.S. and the Caribbean. In Quebec, the largely French-speaking province to the east of Ontario, the average planting is between 1,600 and 1,700 acres.

There are about 80 growers in Quebec, and they market their onions, most of them yellow varieties, throughout Canada and U.S. and into the Caribbean. Information on this year’s harvest was unavailable at press time.

In Manitoba, which borders North Dakota and Minnesota, four growers planted about 550 acres of red, yellow and white varieties.

“We had some problem with Spanish onion sprouting,” Rempel says. “Otherwise, we had good yields of average quality.”

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