Aggie Almanac; 184; Onions Without Borders

You Coming up on Aggy Almanac, an MSU introduces a new Mexico-style onion to a Jordanian farm with astounding results. This type of projects can help the policymakers to help the farmers to produce more, since they can produce 100 persons of the onion to a local market. Why not? His name is Sheikh Halid. He's a better one from Jordan, but this is not the Middle East.

It's an onion field just outside the city limits of Las Cruces, New Mexico. Onions, believe it or not, are the main reason the Sheikh came here in June on his first ever airplane flight. It's a visit that was the result of a somewhat accidental meeting back at his home. I was working in Jordan as part of the team from New Mexico State on a water survey with Dr. Octavio Rameras in Southern Jordan. And that's how I met the Sheikh as part of our interviewing of farmers in that part of the world in an area that has very similar water scarcity problems to New Mexico and the Western U.S. This is the Sheikh's farm in Jordan. Here he keeps the traditional goats and sheep. He also has the traditional tent where guests are entertained. But unlike many Bedouins in this region, the Sheikh has made a successful transition to farming,

growing such things as grapes, apricots, peaches, and, yes, onions. Jordanian Bedouins live in an arid region of the country called Badia, but people depend mostly on raising sheep for income. They were traditionally nomadic, constantly on the move seeking better pastures, but now they're settled and finding their traditional way of life hard to maintain. What's more, wars in the region have left the population a minority in their own country, which is also home to two million Palestinians, and another two million mainly wealthy refugees from Iraq. They have a limited resource of income because of the hard weather and area there. It's desert, so also now we are facing big trouble in the range land. They can't find enough range land for their sheep.

Within our lifetime, it's changed from a nomadic people to a sedentary people that mostly farm, and the objective of the Royal Family in Jordan, which is very well supported by the population, is to find ways to help the Bedouins people maintain their culture and lifestyle in more of an agrarian setting than having to move to urban centers. One way the government is helping is through an organization it's set up called the BRDC, the Body of Research and Development Center. It undertakes projects to help the Bedouins population improve their economic situation, and two years ago it started getting assistance from NMSU. We start working with NMSU in 2006, the end of 2005, putting together a proposal to study some elements in Jordan, such as water use.

Water is a big problem in the Middle East, in general, and in Jordan. Jordan, there's a shortage of water in Jordan. There's no enough surface water. All agriculture sector in Jordan depends on groundwater. So, you know, people they need water for thinking and farmers they need it for agriculture. So, government is all the time they try to manage this sector to first priority is to have the water for drinking. Sound familiar? It turns out that while southern New Mexico and southern Jordan may be miles apart, both geographically and culturally, they have a lot in common. Both regions are at the same latitude. They have a similar climate and similar soil conditions, and both want to develop their agricultural economies without wasting their valuable water resources.

It's for these reasons that the Jordanian BRDC has been working with NMSU, especially on water issues. I've learned more in the last three or four years about the Middle East than I ever would have imagined that I could have learned. Rich Phillips is part of the NMSU team that's been working in Jordan on a number of water-related projects. One involves range land restoration. It's been very overgrazed. They also during the first Gulf War, a lot of sheep were driven in from Iraq that did a lot of damage, and there's some United Nations Rest Reparation funds that are now going to be used to try to help to re-vegetate and do range land management in a professional way to try to be able to make it a sustainable part of their economy. As it is now, there's not enough vegetation left in their deserts to sustain their animals, so they're having to use valuable water to grow feed to feed animals in the desert. So they're trying to look at how can it capture some of the runoff and reestablish some of the vegetation.

And BRDC and the Forest Service have been very successful in that probably one of the best projects I've ever seen in the world is some restoration work done in an area that otherwise would look like the moment. Another project involving the NMSU experts is researching water allocation and agriculture in Jordan through conducting water surveys to find the most efficient use of the precious water resources for the community. That's when the NMSU team came upon Sheikh Khalid. The Sheikh Khalid is one of the larger farms down there. It's one of about four farms that use a lot of the water from the region, but it's the only one that's really a private tribal enterprise. The other industries are owned by corporations, and there is a real debate in Jordan about the use of this aquifer that he's in. They would like for the better one people to benefit from it, but they want to look at what's the best use of this tremendous aquifer. It's actually a fossilized aquifer. It's not being recharged, but the water quality is excellent.

And so we were interested in trying to help the Sheikh look at what horticultural or agricultural crops could be grown and get the best return on the water use. And so in the process of looking at his farm, he grows fruit trees, table grapes, alfalfa, onions, and beans and some other crops there. We discussed that his planting practices and his varieties were different than some of the work that had been done here at New Mexico State. It was the Sheikh's onion crop in particular that caught the team's attention. Because they were at similar latitudes and very similar climates, we talked about whether there was an interest in looking at some of the work we've done on low-pungency onions, and also at changing the planting timing and being able to manage that so that he might be able to come into the market at a better time than he would with a traditional system that was being used in the region. That traditional system involves a spring planting of onions with a late summer harvest, and the type of onion grown is pungent and stores for a relatively long time.

The NMSU researchers suggested the Shay try some of NMSU's onion varieties that are planted in the fall and harvested much earlier in the season. They are sweeter onions with a shorter shelf life, no one knew for sure if they would thrive in Jordan, or if the local population would consume them. Could we talk a little bit about the objective of this project? Find out the team called in NMSU's top onion man, Professor Emeritus Dr. Joe Corgan. He has worked with onions at NMSU for more than 25 years as a plant breeder, and he developed a number of new varieties. He's never set foot in Jordan. If you run one line down the center of the bed. Instead, through video conferencing, Dr. Corgan from an office in NMSU worked with Shay Khaled and members of the BRDC in Jordan to set up an experiment on the Shaykh's farm. In the discussion we arrived setting up a combination research demonstration plot in which we would supply some of the fall planted varieties.

He would grow those. We provided different planting dates as well. One of the problems in a new area like that is you never know what the response to a climate will be. So onion is particularly fall planted or very narrowly adapted for a climate. We wanted to know what an ideal planting date would be there. If you plant onions in the fall, if they grow too much in the fall and they get too big, then they produce seed stocks instead of bulbs in the next year. So that planting date is very critical. The intermediates like he was growing, you really can't plant in the fall because they tend to bolt. So it was important to get different varieties that would adapt to that kind of planting.

Onion takes two years to complete its life cycle and so it's very important to understand the relationship between the amount of sunlight or the photo period and the time of planting. So there were some things that needed to be looked at from a research standpoint. As the project got underway, the NMSU team stayed in touch with Shay Khaled through the internet. We're suggesting that Shay Khaled consider three different varieties and three different planting dates. Those planting dates being October 1st, October 15th and November 1st to give him an opportunity to look at these three varieties that we think will do well in Jordan and also then provide him with the data on what the best combination of planting dates and yields might be. If you plant too late, then your yield is less.

So somewhere in the middle between those extremes is the ideal planting date and it's really important to know about what that date is in order to get the best results. There were plenty of questions and concerns like getting the soil analyzed, how to prepare the beds, how far apart to space the plantings, what fertilizer to use, which herbicides are best and how to irrigate the crop. I can tell the shape that Dr. Corrigan said looking at these pictures, he can tell that he's a very good farmer. So what we want to do is we want to, we'll provide the seed and we'll provide the planting dates. Now that we see the type of farmer he is and how good a farmer he is, we will let him make the decisions on a fertilizer watering and everything. Over the next several months, the sweet onion seeds developed in New Mexico sprouted from the Jordanian soil on the shakes experimental plots.

Actually the first year we found that during the first season, we get a great result actually. For the quantity produced, it's doubled in the varieties that he used to plant in his farm. Ismail Abu Amoud is also a Bedouin from Jordan. He was born in a Bedouin tent and tended sheep until he was old enough to go to school. He ended up working with Jordan's BRDC, eventually getting involved with NMSU's projects in that country. With the help of a scholarship provided through the partnership, he's now a doctoral student at New Mexico State, pursuing the newly created Doctor of Economic Development degree. He says the experiment determined these onions could thrive in Jordan and the best date for planting them was late October. And he says the timing of this onion project was perfect.

People now are looking for new varieties in different types of agriculture products because now we are living in open market. So the country is open to import from around the world in different varieties and the consumers looking for the good quality and maybe new taste. But will Jordanians want to pay a higher price for an onion that they've never tried before? And the sweet onion find a good market in Jordan. I'm on Go name is another Jordanian working on his Doctor of Economic Development degree at NMSU. As part of his studies, he's been working with Rich Phillips in introducing the new onion varieties to his home country. And he's convinced his fellow Jordanians will buy them. More than 95% of Jordanian are Muslim. And in Islamic culture, people can't eat onion at night, it's prohibited in their religious because of smell.

And they can't go to the mosque with onion smell. For that, such this type of sweet onion, it has less smell, means that we are expecting high demand on the onion. Go name says the New Mexico onion has some other advantages for Jordan as well. In Jordan, the local farmers supply for the local market only 25% of all onion. 75% came from the outside farmers from different countries like Egypt, Turkey, and Syria. So this type of projects can help the policymakers to help the farmers to produce more. They can produce 100% of the onion to the local market. Why not? Why not? And this type of onion, since Jordan, one of the most added region in the world,

we believe that researchers here in MSU throw this project. We came with a good result that onion need less water, comparing with other crabs. And this, it can help also, more yield, more outboard, more profit, more income in terms of cubic meter used, comparing with other crabs, which has less demand in Jordan. But if he's going to get into the sweet onion business, he has to make sure that he does put his own brand, and pays a lot of, puts some money and attention in developing a brand name so that consumers and restaurant people recognize that these are onions different than the regular onions. Dr. Bill Gorman is an enemy-shoe professor of agricultural economics and an expert in marketing agricultural crops.

And he says it will take some effort to explain to Jordanians why they should buy the shakes new type of onion. The sweet onion looks almost the same in a grocery store or in a box as a regular onion. But our sweeter, there's a little more water content and considerably less proving acid. That's what makes them sweet. And they're ideal onion for going into salads, putting on hamburgers and this type of thing. And they're good for people who can't tolerate regular onions too much because of the acid content. But they don't store as handle quite as well. And the idea from a growers standpoint is to make sure that you get a premium price for the sweet onions. And that's the concept behind what we're suggesting that he does try to look for the very attractive brand name and market them so they can get maybe 20 to 30% higher price for the sweet onions.

The interaction between Sheikh Khalid and Anima Shiu came to a climax with a visit by the Sheikh to the university and southern New Mexico. He came to get a first-hand look at the onion industry here and to see if there are other things he can learn to improve his onion crop back at home. And his farm he used to produce different varieties of onion and similar way to the way that they produce onion here. But there's a big difference in some advanced technology used here in irrigation and fertilizing and how to pack the product and market it. So he said that he get a lot of knowledge about what's going on here in the onion field during his visit.

Indeed he did, starting with a look at Anima Shiu's onion research facilities. I told him about the fall variety trial that we do here in the organic plant is that we try to select a variety that has different maturity dates, some of them are early, some of them are intermediate, some of them are late. And we usually compare the variety that we are trying to produce compared to a commercial variety that's being planted within our area here. And from this variety trial we select the varieties that have a capability of potentially being a variety with a name brand. So we need to repeat this variety a few years, preferably at least three years to make sure that this variety is stable and performing better than the commercial variety.

And then after that we sell this breeder seed to a seed company in California that produces more of it, like kind of expand the seed and make it lots of seed and sell it as a commercial. And of course they give us rights and the Anima Shiu will benefit from this sale. Sheikh Khalid is very interested in the seeds. He'd like to get into the seed business himself back in Jordan where all onion seed has to be imported. This thing out here was a trasher for small seed samples. What it does is break up the capsules, release the seed and then you put that in here and this cleans the seed, gets rid of most of the trash. That's something he might like to do. Yes, he likes to produce all seeds for his farm.

Breeder seeds developed at Anima Shiu are stored in this special room. This is a cold room that we keep under 60 Fahrenheit or 15 Celsius. And without humidity we have a dehumidifier that will pull any humidity that's in the room because we'd like to have this room cold at 15 Celsius with no humidity. By this procedure we can keep the viability of the onions probably 7, 10 years or even more because we would like to have this onion seed viable for many years because every year we pull out some breeding lines and we cross it with other breeding lines. That's why we have to store the onions for many years in order for us to produce no varieties of onions and keep the seeds viable as much as possible.

The sheikh also got a look at a planting machine. We want to plant the onions, we would like to plant it about 4 to 5 inches apart so the onions have space to grow. Because if there is an onion growing next to another onion then you'll have a flat surface and we don't like that because the consumer doesn't like onion to be flat. The consumer like the onions to be rounded and circle what have you. So we have to make sure that the onion is produced in enough space for it to grow and become rounded and good shape for the consumer. This machine also inspired the sheikh. This machine is called undercut. This bar here rotates once this is behind the tractor then this bar will rotate and it goes underneath the soil and underneath the onions.

By rotating this bar is going to pull the onions and from its roots and it will keep it on the bed. But what we did is we loosened up the soil and we loosened up the roots and we broke the roots from underneath. So to be very easy once the onion come here we just lift it and we clip the roots and we clip the leaves and then already to be harvested. These onions have already been undercut and are overdue for harvesting so workers are busy in the field. Sheikh Khalid as part of his tour gets the chance to see this New Mexico farm just outside Las Cruces. The farm is bigger than the sheikhs but the yield of onions is about the same per acre.

Still the sheikh knows he can learn a lot from New Mexico onion growers because New Mexico is one of the top onion producers in the United States. The newly harvested crop gets sorted and put into sacks at plants like this one, barker produce. The sheikh marvels at the efficiency of the operation but wonders why the onion grading is still done by hand. Because these onions are a real soft soft onion and with the machine it gets too hot and it really messes the onions up. So everything has to be by hand. But a machine is used to clean up the onions and another contraption sorts the onions by sizes. Oh I put a different size chains on you can see all of my different chains over there and I can change the chains to make different sizes. It's a system that gets the attention of Sheikh Khalid.

He currently does all the sizing by hand on his farm and wants to know how he can get a machine like this one. The group moves on to take a look at the bagging system which is also mechanized. It's a process that does little damage to the onions. There are fewer than 2% of damaged onions in each bag. For the sheikh all this input is invaluable. Agriculture in Jordan is still in a good level but the things that he's seen here it's more advanced and there's new technology like equipments used here and marketing packaging. All of these things is new for him and it might help him to improve his work.

There's no reason he can't have duplicate many of the things we do. He of course doesn't have the advantage of a large several like 3, 4,000 acres of onions which we do. So he's got to really put it in his own packing shed. But he is doing planning doing that and he's also planning on putting into some cold storage so he can hold things a little longer. We are talking about such as transferring technology from a developed country to a developing country from the United States to Jordan. And this type of projects give a good key for the policymakers in Jordan to think more widely all over the world and to look for the developed countries, what they have, what we can adopt, how to help the farmers. But there is a larger aspect to this exchange than just sharing research on agriculture. In our first visit with the shake we sat with village elders and at the end of the day they they commented that they they were getting a very distorted view of the west.

And you have to you have to understand these are very isolated areas. These aren't areas that you drive to on a super interstate. You know we we traveled across sand dunes and actually got stuck in sand dunes trying to get to one of his farms. And so their information is filtered and they were very happy and wanted to encourage the relationships so that they could learn more. And then of course for us those of us who have traveled there we have gained a much greater respect for how much in common we share with Islam. And how the majority of the people of the Middle East have the same hopes and desires that we have. It is the fanatics at all ends of all spectrums that seem to be getting a disproportionate amount of attention. But I've been treated as warmly and as generously in the Middle East as anywhere I've ever visited in the world. You

You You You

You Coming up on Texas Parks and Wildlife. There's no mechanism to leave adequate amounts of water in the river and that situation has to be reversed or the whooping crane is going to go extinct. He has an unshakable belief and habitat being the key and realize that that is a foundation for everything in this ecosystem. When using a tree stand your full body safety harness should be worn from the moment you leave the ground until you return to the ground. Texas Parks and Wildlife.

This series is funded in part by a grant from the Sport Fish and Wildlife Restoration Program through your purchases of hunting and fishing equipment and motorboat fuels nearly 20 million dollars in conservation efforts are funded in Texas each year. Texas Parks and Wildlife Restoration Program. When it's first light that's the best time to be here because they're up and they're moving and especially if it's cold they're moving. And you never know what you're going to see when you go around a curve you don't know what's what's going to be on the other side that kind of adds to the mystique of the whole thing. It's a great place to be.

For thousands of years the wetlands and marshlands along the Texas Gulf Coast have provided a rich habitat for many species of plants and animals. But these habitats began to disappear in the early 1900s. In the 1930s America was going through a drought and waterfowl populations were in trouble all around the country. And so in 1937 Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order which established the refuge and set it aside for waterfowl and migratory bird management. The Arensis National Wildlife Refuge is surrounded by bay waters. Its marshes are home to a variety of plants and animals from waterfowl to the American alligator. Moving inland dense thickets provide shelter for white tail deer, havelina, coyotes and raccoons. Although the refuge is set aside for wildlife visitors have a place here too.

I'm saying more ducks than I have ever seen in my life. And more geese. The Wildlife Interpretive Center houses an exhibit that features the species and habitats of the region. Yeah, just a little to the left and over near the other shore you can see just two little spots. Can you see them? You can see those two things that are in the water. Just go to the right of that one that looks a bit of land. You see them? They're pretty. This is a beautiful place here isn't it? Sure is. We come down every year. Oh, we're in New York. You even know they're so far away, isn't it still worth it? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, this is just lovely. Rancis is marvelous. There's a real nature. I'm OK. When you've heard about Perman 1 of these trails, when you turn around and come back up to trail,

it looks worse than it did when you went down almost. You have to trim it again. We're stuck out there.