Onion Farmers in Nueva Ecija Earn Millions in Just One Cropping

Onion growers in Bongabon, Nueva Ecija who have shifted from growing traditional onion to hybrid varieties have positive prospect to earn millions in just one cropping, said Dante Delima (–foul word(s) removed–)istant Director Bureau of Plant Industry and High-Value Crops Development Program (HVCDP) coordinator.

Hybrid onion varieties produce up to thrice the output compare of traditional strains, he added.

“Positive high earning for the onion growers is to be expected because of a large volume of onion crop to be produced the next harvest time and for the reason that the BPI had restricted the importation in response to the unrelenting complaint of onion growers in Bongabon who could not compete with imported onions dumped in the country,” Delima said.

Bongabon is known to be the country’s onion capital has a total of 3,000 hectares concentrated to onion cultivation, more than half of the total land areas were concentrated to the crop in the province.

Nueva Ecija province accounted for 72.7-million kilos of onion produced in the year 2009, 57-percent of the national yield of 127-million kilos of the same year.

During off-season onion prices fetch higher around P100.00 per kilo for the hybrid onion and P60.00 per kilo for the traditional verities of red creole and yellow granex.

In Barangay Vega, Bongabon farmer Quirino Francisco expects to harvest 28,000 kilos of red hybrid onions and 42,000 kilos of hybrid yellow onions this coming season from his 2-hectares farm of that would earn millions, according to BPI.

Fernando Lorenzo, Region 3 HVCDP coordinator said, one of the reasons to point the good yields this year was the financial (–foul word(s) removed–)istance amounting to P15 million worth of hybrid onion seeds, P4.5 million worth of Yellow Granex and Red Creole seeds and worth P500,000 of onion seeds to farmers in nearby towns in the province. The effort was provided by the Agricultural Secretary Proceso J. Alcala

Those who planted sometime in the month of November last year will be harvesting the crop by the month of April, since the hybrid onions mature earlier compare than the traditional varieties, revealed Lorenzo.

Previously onion growers suffered losses due to low prices as a result of imported onions in the country from China. Now, the Department of Agriculture (DA) is helping close to 2,500 onion growers in the province of Nueva Ecija, said Lorenzo.