This summer, Nunhems, BASF’s vegetable seeds business, added three new short-day onion varieties: Adhora, Rosefire and Isidea.
Adhora is a yellow onion designed for growers in Vidalia, Ga., and Texas. Kaitlyn O’Neal, regional crop lead for BASF and Nunhems, says it features the iconic Granex shape and offers growers a good packouts and quality.
Nunhems says Adhora will also help reduce food waste due to improved uniformity, with only about 1% or 2% going to waste verse the industry average of 8% to 10%.
“One thing that’s pretty unique about it compared to some other competitive varieties right now is that it is 100% the quintessential flat Vidalia, Ga., onion, and it’s sweet, it tastes good and it looks like a Vidalia onion,” O’Neal says.
O’Neal says that Rosefire, a short-day red onion, capitalizes on consumers’ continued interest in red onions. Rosefire is designed for growers in California and Texas.
“People love the look of them,” she says. “They love just the brightness of the color. And Rosefire delivers that bright color, that dark, beautiful red onion color, that pungent taste that really adds to whatever it is you’re using it with it.”
Rosefire offers growers improved bolting tolerance and good leaf health. O’Neal says a challenge with breeding bolting tolerance is that onions need to bolt to reproduce seed.
“It’s this fine line of trying to figure out how easy it is to make seed so that we can sell seed, but also not too much bolting so that the end grower or the consumer isn’t getting a nasty onion because it bolted in the field,” she says. “So, Rosefire is an improvement compared to some other market standards in that market segment.”
Isidea, a short-day white onion designed for growers in Mexico and Texas, offers good disease resistance. O’Neal says white onions are also important to American consumers.
“It has an early maturity in the field, a bright white color once it’s out of the field, and it gives a really consistent bulk size, so that everyone gets that size that they’re wanting to use in whatever it is they’re cooking,” she says.
20 Years in the Making
O’Neal says Nunhems has had a history in breeding onions, both long-day and short-day, although most breeders don’t release three onion varieties at once.
“It’s a little bit unusual, but we were able to bring everything together,” she says. “The stars aligned, and we were able to introduce three new varieties this year for growers.”
O’Neal says what makes onion breeding a challenge is that it’s a long-term process of bringing a new onion variety to market.
“It takes about 20 years to bring a new onion to fruition,” she says. “So, it’s imperative that our breeders have the future in mind and what the growers and the consumers of 20 years from now will want when they make those crosses. We’re always really focused on with our program is maintaining quality, not only for the consumer but also for growers so they aren’t losing a lot of quality in the field or in the packing shed.”
O’Neal says these new releases go through vigorous testing.
“We put these things through the ringer,” she says. “We put them in really, really hot fields when it comes to disease pressure to see if they fail, and they didn’t fail. We feel very confident that these will stand up to the conditions in a grower’s field.”
Though these onions may each have a specific target location that they grow well in, Nunhems also looks at how a variety might perform on a global market, O’Neal says.
“All three of these varieties are not just U.S. varieties,” she says. “We also are introducing them in Mexico and in their respective areas, and then there’s other areas globally that they’ll find their market, too.”
