Crookham Company to Release Vidalia Varieties

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By Dave Alexander, Publisher

There is a new player in the Vidalia onion game, but one that is familiar to growers. Crookham Company has two new sweet onion varieties, specifically developed for southern Georgia. Onion World interviewed Lyndon Johnson, sales development manager at Crookham, to learn more.

Onion World: Tell us about your new Vidalia seed varieties and what you are expecting out of them.

Crookham Company: These have come up through our chain of product development, meaning that they’ve been worked out from some small 10-foot trials over the last five, maybe even 10 years. We build up parent lines to get a larger volume of seed, and these two varieties, out of all the selections we started with, have looked the most promising.

The first one we have is 4021, and the other is 4022. Once we are completely happy with them, which I think we are now, we will give them a name and start selling them commercially. That will happen in 2026 because that’s just how long it takes to build up the parent lines of these two hybrids to get enough volume to make a good-sized production.

Onion World: Does 2026 mean the 2026 crop year?

Crookham Company: The seed will come off in late July of 2026. All of our seed is produced in the U.S. We have a couple growing areas in California, and the rest is grown in Hatch, New Mexico, in the Las Cruces area. They will be ready for planting in September 2026 for the Vidalia program to be harvested in 2027.

Both of these onions are very early in the program, so when the flag drops there that you can start putting onions in a Vidalia box, these onions are matured and ready. They are up front in the maturity cycle. 4022 is a traditional flat onion. 4021 is a bit deeper of a bulb, so you can get a lot more yield back per acre.

Onion World: Are the flavor profiles the same on both onions?

Crookham Company: They are pretty darn close to being the same. They’ve been tested at the University of Georgia and qualify to be sold under the Vidalia onion brand. You have to go through three years of testing at the University of Georgia to make sure that the quality and flavor profile desired in the Vidalia onion will always be there.

Onion World: What are you seeing so far on the 2025 harvest?

Crookham Company: We are happy with the yield and competitive with anything else that’s out there in that early segment. We are happy with where we are at with both of these onions. Later on, as we develop more parent lines, we will have some that go into the main season as well. There are lots more years of work to be done, but there are two that look really good so far. We will have more onions coming for the Vidalia market as well.

Onion World: Why should someone choose your Vidalia varieties over what they are using now?

Crookham Company: If you want an onion that will be ready right at the start of the Vidalia program and one that has the ability to add more yield, given the same planting scheme, the same fertilizer and same input usage, I believe that 4021 will appeal to growers. The 4022 looks absolutely flat and traditional looking – and just a dynamite flavor profile on both. They both have very strong tops and root systems.

Onions are sprinkler-irrigated in Georgia. Those growers are very, very technical. They know what they are doing. We do not want to have an onion that promotes a lot of bacterial disease under overhead irrigation. These two take care of themselves and do very well. They have a lot of wax buildup on them that allows water just to run off the foliage and not sit on it. And they have real tight necks, so we don’t get anything sitting in there and making a mess from a disease perspective. Whether air-borne bacteria or air-borne fungus, we’re really happy with their performance in that manner.

Onion World: Crookham is based in the Treasure Valley of Idaho. What are best “go-to” storage onions for this area?

Crookham Company: Over the last 10 to 15 years, let’s look at what Crookham has represented. Crookham started out with the highly single-centered large onion that’s good for processing, or foodservice, or even retail for that matter. That’s been the focus of our breeding program, but we’re expanding out. We’ve got a couple more maturities and some different onions that would be more retail-favored and grow well in the Columbia Basin under a pivot.

Here in the Treasure Valley, our bread and butter are Caldwell and Caliber. Those two varieties have taken off in the last five or six years.

It takes an onion a few years to develop more of a market share. As onion growers learn how to grow it and learn exactly how to plant it, feed it, fertilize it, take care of it and all the things that go along with it during the season, once they get that puzzle figured out, then it’s much easier to grow market share as things go on.

Onion World: You mentioned learning how to grow and what steps to take. Your website is really cool. It gives planting dates, fertility, when to use fungicides, how to harvest. You also have photos and videos. You have this information for all your popular varieties, right?

Crookham Company: You bet. I’m going to step into this a little further and we’ll do this for the whole portfolio. We almost have to make them area-specific, too. Like with Caldwell, it’s really good information for California, Idaho, Washington and the western half of the U.S. up in the north.

We spend all this time and put all this effort into product development as seed-producing companies, so it’s proper to give as much information as we figured out through our product development and through learning what growers have done that’s successful or not successful. It really helps to capture that data that would give a grower the best chance of success. If he’s just swinging at it the first time, or if he’s swinging at it the second or third time, we can refine that and help each other.

Onion World: So check these out at Crookham.com. The information is really good. It’s a little too early to have the Vidalia info on there, but that will be coming?

Crookham Company: Yes, those will be on there once we get names. We’ll probably name these two varieties right after the Georgia planting in 2025, so we’ll have commercial names in 2026.

Editor’s note: This article is adapted from The Onion Podcast, edited for brevity and clarity. To listen to the entire interview, visit TheOnionPodcast.com.