This year's Decision Makers Agriculture Tour hosted by Chamber of Commerce focused on one of the wonders of Genesee County, the mucklands and  the onions those fields produce.

"We got to see the Big O onion facility and it was beautiful, a really high-tech way of processing onions," said Tom Turnbull, interim president of the Chamber. "It's just amazing. Every time I come on one of these tours, the technology that goes into producing our food in this county is amazing."

As Turnbull and tour participants stood on the black soil of the mucklands on a cloudless afternoon near rows of onions waiting to be harvested, he marveled at unique enterprise.

"Seeing what the muckland is and the history, which I really didn't know the full story, about what is strange swamp land that's high in nutrients, and there's only a finite amount of in the country," Turnbull said. "It's just fascinating."

For The Batavian's previous coverage of the mucklands and onion production, click here.

Photos by Howard Owens

Press release: 

Story and photos courtesy Tom Rivers, Orleans Hub.

Joe Bezon, a third-generation muck farmer, had just headed home after a hard day’s work on Monday afternoon when it started raining. A sprinkle soon turned into a deluge.

Bezon’s home in Byron was pounded by the rain. He drove to the muck and saw water, everywhere. Bezon was about 75 percent done planting onions for the season. Now there was standing water in the fields.

Bezon said about an inch of rain fell at his house, and 2 inches in the muck.

Bezon and the muck farmers were able to pump lots of the water off the muck on Tuesday, leaving them optimistic the plants and seeds would survive. But he is nervous about the forecast for Thursday, which says another inch to 2 inches is headed our way.

“The water has gone down a lot,” he said Tuesday evening on the muck. “It all depends on Thursday and the through the weekend. It’s wait and see what happens next. It looks like another 10 days of poor weather.”

Another big rain and farmers will struggle to get rid of the water. Bezon said the ground is saturated and the drainage ditches at near capacity.

For the full story, visit Orleans Hub.

Representatives from onion companies from all over the world were in Genesee County today to see the world famous Elba Mucklands.

The tour is part of a convention of onion industry leaders hosted by the National Onion Association in Niagara County this week. The attendees had breakfast in Batavia and then toured the mucklands.

The visit included a presentation by Christy Hoepting, a researcher with the Cornell Cooperative Extension, who is studying the impact of weeds on onion growth and how best to control them in the field.

There was also a presentation on experimental onion varieties being grown in the muck.

There were people in the tour group from not only the United States, but also Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Canada and Mexico.

"This is a beautiful and productive place," said Kim Reddin, director of public and industry relations for NOA. "Absolutely, it's unique and one of the main growing areas in the eastern part of the United States."

The weather is once again playing havoc with the potential onion crop in the mucklands.

Early in the season, it was too dry and too hot. Now, saturated ground is stressing some tender plants.

Perhaps as much as 20 percent of the crop won't make it to harvest.

Paul Mortellaro said the situation is hardly a disaster at this point.

"It would be nice to get some normal weather," Mortellaro said, "rather than ' it's too hot, it's too cold, it's too dry, it's too wet.' "

Activity is picking up on the muck this week as onion growers finally have suitable conditions for planting. One onion grower told us yesterday that ideally, growers like to have all of April to plant and they're getting a late start this year, but they should still get all of the fields filled with seeds and seedlings by May, if the weather holds.

The reader who submitted this photo called it "Elba Mucklands Snow Drift Art."

My father just left after a two-day visit to Batavia. Wednesday, we visited the Holland Land Office Museum, Oliver's and the Batavia Cemetery and then drove down to Letchworth State Park. Yesterday, I gave him a Genesee County ag tour that started at Post Farms, then the mucklands, then Mortellaro Brothers in Elba then Baskin Livestock in Bethany.  

The only pictures I took yesterday were of crates of onions on the mucklands at Torrey Farms property. These, I thought worth sharing.

There's some big onions growing in the muck of Genesee and Orleans counties.

A photographer lining up his focus on a particularly bulbous specimen observes, "I don't remember seeing any onions this big last year."

"I haven't seen onions this big in 15 years," responds Paul Mortellaro, co-owner of Mortellaro Brothers in Elba.

On the one hand, the heavy rains of spring created near optimal growing conditions, especially for the onions that were started as transplants. On the other, heavy rain caused some flooding and damaged portions of some fields.

"You're not going to get 100 percent of your crop on 100 percent of your land, but I haven't seen a crop like this in 10 years," Mortellaro said.

Over the next few weeks, local onion farmers will be reaping that harvest. Already, several hundred acres of onions have been crated and bagged.

Much of the success so far of the onion crop is really the near ideal growing conditions of the middle of summer, where enough rain fell to feed the onions, but cool weather and enough dry days allowed perfect growing conditions.

The muckland farmers still have potential weather problems to worry about before the growing and harvest season is over. Mortellaro recalled one year when a severe hail storm came through and heavily damaged the crops of a couple of farms unlucky enough to have their fields right in the line of the main part of the storm.

But if conditions remain good, 2014 will go down as an excellent year for local onions.

A Mortellaro field. Once onions are ready for harvest, a machine pulls them from the ground and sets them back on the soil so the onions can dry before being harvested.

A big onion in a Torrey Farms field.

Mortellaro onions ready for harvest. As part of processing, the dry outer skins are removed, so they'll have a nice shine on store shelves.

Dried onions in a Torrey field being harvested.

Workers at Torrey Farms crate harvested onions. At the Torrey plant, workers arrange three rows of 20 crates each, with enough space between to drive a truck through. Trucks come in only minutes apart, giving workers very little time between loads to get the trucks empty. Mortellaro said it's a difficult job, hot and dusty and constant motion.

Crates full of onions at Mortellaro's processing facility.

Torrey Onions

Not onions. Beets. MY-T Acres land at Transit and Chapell roads, Byron.

There are some years that are better than others for onion growers.

This year is one of the others.

Paul Mortellaro, co-owner of G Mortellaro And Sons in Elba, said this year's harvest will be about 60 to 75 percent of an average year and about 50 percent of a good year.

That sounds about right, said John Torrey, of Big-O Farms, Elba.

Wind, cold and rain either blew away or drowned a good portion of the onion crop this summer.

"The onions were thinned so much by the wind that you're not seeing a lot of small bulbs, but you're not seeing a lot of tonnage because there's not a high enough plant population," Mortellaro said.

Big-O runs a huge onion operation and Torrey agreed that wind and water were a problem this year.

"We've had our challenges during the growing season," Torrey said. "While we're in the midst of a full harvest, we're probably going to have a little below average yield."

The price for onions right now -- a market largely determined by Western growers -- is from $9 to $11 per 50-pound bag, Mortellero said. That's decent, but of course local onion growers would like to see it go higher.

Onions are a slow crop to bring to maturity and harvesting them is a slow process, too. The harvest started in July and will continue through October.

Out on the muck today, I met Elizabeth Buck and Courtney Hill, researchers from Cornell. They are assisting in a project to test four different kinds of possible treatments to combat rhizoctonia. Rhizoctonia is a fungus that goes after the roots of onions. (Pictured above, Hill; Buck is pictured in the slide show below).