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By Dante Galeazzi, President, Texas International Produce Association
As home to the first fresh onions available domestically and the original sweet onion – the Texas 1015 Sweet Onion – Texas plays a critical role in the U.S. onion industry. The season typically kicks off in mid-March and continues into the first days of July or until the weather gets too hot for too long. While Texas onion growers typically produce around 3.5 million bags per year, they strive for better yields and hope for cooperative weather to get closer to the 4 million figure annually.
Texas onions are truly unique. They are the first new crop sweet onions, meaning they’re the first domestically grown onions available every year. Consumers love this variety of onions because they have less pyruvic acid (the juices that make you cry), making them ideal for both cooked and raw consumption. Texas 1015s are particularly delightful when sautéed or grilled, offering a mild flavor, excellent crunch and great nutritional benefits, perfect for enjoying fresh anytime.
Named after their ideal planting date of Oct. 15, Texas 1015 Sweet Onions faced a delayed planting start in 2023 due to a prolonged hot summer lasting through October and into November. While shippers will have supplies in March, the peak of the harvest is expected in the later weeks of April, just in time for spring promotions and the barbecue season.
Since the bulk of the Texas onion crop will be around late April into early May, the marketing geniuses of Full Tilt Marketing helped choose this year’s campaign: The Sizzlin’ Flavor of the Texas 1015 Sweet Onions. This campaign features sweet prizes selected based on the imagery that comes from grilling onions on warm spring days, capturing the mouthwatering smell as family and friends gather to enjoy meals outdoors before the heat of summer fully takes over. The Texas 1015 Sweet Onion will have plenty of social media and consumer-facing toolkits to help any seller or marketer better reach their buying audience – and those tools are free at www.tx1015.com.
Texas not only grows Texas 1015 Sweet Onions, but the state also grows plenty of conventional yellows, reds and whites to round out the onion category. Going into the Texas onion season, supplies have been very limited for both domestic and internationally grown onions due to a variety of factors, so there are a lot of indicators pointing toward pricing for Texas onions being much stronger than previous years.
While Texas is renowned for its sunshine, growers have faced challenges, including excessive heat in 2023 and several days of freezing temperatures in January that slowed growth. However, the most significant issue has been the limited availability of water.
The Rio Grande Valley (RGV), where nearly 80 percent of the Texas onion crop is grown, relies on water from the Rio Grande River. Both the South Texas growers and the farmers in Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon, Mexico, depend on the Rio Grande River as the primary water source for both agriculture and residential use.
A 1944 treaty overseeing shared waters between Mexico and the U.S. states that the U.S. will send water from the Colorado River to Mexico, and Mexico will in turn deliver water to the Rio Grande River. In the last 30 years, the U.S. has never missed a delivery while Chihuahua, Mexico, has never made a delivery in that time. Since the treaty was signed, the state of Chihuahua has built reservoirs away from the international border and has filled them with the inflows from the Colorado River. Without that flow of water, the Rio Grande River continues to report historically low water levels.
Last summer, the water situation in Tamaulipas, Mexico, reached a point where residents in the Mexican city of Monterrey were limited to water for only a few days a week, and only a few hours each day. Similar conditions are arriving in the RGV. Earlier this year, after 51 years in business, the last sugar mill in Texas (located in the RGV) announced its closure. Farmers growing nearly 30,000 acres of sugarcane had no choice but to plow anything in the field into the ground, and the 500 employees at the mill were laid off.
Water has impacted many of the other 40 fruit and vegetable commodities grown in the RGV, as farmers have collectively reported changing their crop mix to less water-intensive crops such as cabbage and onions. As the situation with water becomes scarcer in the region, more water districts may limit or simply stop water service to agriculture. The issue is such that Texas onion growers have a sharp eye on the future of the water availability in the region.
