An unusually warm winter and early harvest thunderstorms last summer left growers and processors in Malheur County with an excess amount of damaged onions – roughly 800 million pounds.

And they’re trying to get rid of them, fast.

In the Pacific Northwest, a warm and dry winter brought little snow. In Oregon, December, January and February were the warmest or tied for the warmest winter months on record. Across the state and much of the Western U.S., farmers are staring at a bleak growing season with less water.

And in Malheur County, the warm winter caused onions to sprout while in storage, or rot following an early harvest thunderstorm back in August.

On Friday, the Oregon Department of Agriculture, at the request of the Malheur County Onion Growers Association, temporarily relaxed a set of rules for farmers and processors to get rid of the excess onions before pests, such as the onion maggot, take over this season’s crops.

Oregon is among the country’s top-producing states for onions. In 2024, the industry was worth $260 million in the state. Most of these onions are grown in Eastern Oregon. Malheur County is unofficially known as the largest onion-producing county in the nation.

Most onions are harvested in late summer or early fall and later put in storage warehouses, where they will be bagged and stored until they are sent to grocery stores or restaurants. The warehouses are kept cool naturally through the winter.

But because of this winter’s record high temperatures, those warehouses didn’t get cool enough for the onions to go dormant, said Stuart Reitz, the director of the Oregon State University Malheur Experiment Station.

“If you stick an onion in your refrigerator, you can come back a few weeks later, and it still looks like it did when you stuck it in the fridge,” Reitz said. “If you leave that onion on your kitchen counter where it’s nice and warm, chances are it’s going to sprout, and that’s basically what we had a lot of happening here.”

It’s normal for processors to toss out onions that are damaged or don’t meet quality standards, but this year’s 800 million pounds of culled onions is roughly double the amount that gets tossed out in a normal year, Reitz said.

To get rid of those onions, growers need to follow a set of rules that require them to shred the onions into pieces and work them into the soil in fields away from a production area.

This is to limit the spread of onion maggots, which can damage an entire onion bulb when they feed on it.

“The idea is that you’ve chopped up the [onions] into fine pieces, so that the onion bulb, after it gets shredded, is no longer a reproductive host for the maggots,” Reitz said. “They just simply can’t survive on that shredded up material.”

Growers are only allowed to apply 80 tons of onion shreds per acre, but because of the excess amount this year, the agriculture department has temporarily lifted the limit.

That limit was set to minimize the amount of nitrogen that seeps into the ground as nitrate in the groundwater or runoff to rivers and creeks.

In its temporary rules, the agricultural department also clarified what types of insecticides farmers can use to spray on those onion piles if they can’t shred to bury the onions in time because of inclement weather or other conditions.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/04/07/warm-winter-left-malheur-growers-with-800-million-pounds-onions/