Story and photos by Dave Alexander, Publisher
Releasing a new onion variety is a huge endeavor for any onion breeder. Things move slowly, and it is not a simple process. From concept to market can take up to 20 years. Breeders have to take many things into account and try to determine what growers will want in the distant future.
At the Crookham Company’s Summer Onion Show, held Aug. 26 in Wilder, Idaho, Crookham Company breeder David Whitwood explained the first thing they do when developing a new variety is talk to growers, identifying their concerns and needs. The trick to developing a successful variety is finding out what will be the growers’ next big problem and what they are missing in the varieties they are currently using.
Forward Looking
“What you really need to be doing is looking eight, 10, 12 years down the road because that’s when that variety will finally come into play,” Whitwood said.
Factors such as better disease tolerance, more uniformity, darker scale, scale retention and storability can all make up a “bigger picture” of what breeders develop.
An example of forward-looking varietal development is pink root tolerance. Compared to 20 years ago, there is less ground available now to farmers, leading to tighter rotations. Less rotation can lead to more disease, so varieties today feature pink root tolerance, something varieties didn’t have two decades ago.
Trident
Crookham Company launched and promoted two new yellow long-day varieties last year – Caldwell and Caliber. Another yellow was also ready, but wasn’t pushed by the company. Crookham needed more data on how it was working in the Treasure Valley and found it was working remarkably well. That variety, Trident, is now ready for center stage.
Trident matures earlier than Caldwell and Caliber, giving growers another harvest option and more flexibility. If all three varieties were planted, Trident would be harvested first, followed by Caldwell and then Caliber.
In addition to the earlier maturity, Trident is a multi-use variety, suitable for processing and the fresh market. It has high pink root and Fusarium tolerance, upright tops and 97 percent single centers.
The most unique thing about Trident is that it grows well in Washington, the Midwest and the Northeast. This three-pronged geography is what originally gave Trident its name. Rarely do varieties work well in all three markets, but the later Treasure Valley confirmation actually makes it a four-market onion.
CEO George Crookham joked, “We should have called it Four-dent.”
More to Come
West Coast Crookham sales representative Lyndon Johnson said that the three new long-days are performing well. There are also more varieties that will be introduced in the coming years that will have even better improvements.
Dubbed OLYX11-249 and OLYX11-250, these two yellow candidates have been doing well in early trials. They will undergo bigger block trials for the 2021 growing season.
OLYX11-249 is a main-season yellow long-day variety with maturity in 115-118 days. It has nice, upright tops with glossy foliage that is well adapted to the Western U.S. Strong roots provide great pink root and Fusarium resistance on this variety. Scales are a light copper color with great scale retention for long-term storage. The bulbs are very highly single-centered.
The 250 variety matures in 118-120 days and features strong roots and a great disease resistance package. It has an erect structure with glossy foliage that aids in thrips tolerance and consistent bronze scale color with very high single centers. Like 249, 250 has very good long-term storage capability.
When these two cultivars hit the market, it will be thanks to Crookham’s forward-looking breeders who conceived the varieties years earlier.
