Partly due to difficult weather conditions, the 2023 harvest will be lower. More onions were harvested, but less grain, barley and potatoes for consumption. Due to drought and salinization, the yield of onions in Zeeland continues to decline.
More than 9 percent more seeds were harvested, a total of 1.2 million tons. This mainly concerned yellow seeds, the harvest of red onions amounted to 157,000 tons. The gross yields of consumption potatoes (3.4 million tons) have decreased by 5.6 percent. The yield of barley (minus 20.3 percent) was 260,000 tons. Wheat yields also fell by 7.4 percent. The harvest amounted to 1.2 million tons. This is evident from the harvest estimate of the Central Bureau of Statistics.
In 2023, onions did especially well in the Northern Netherlands. There, a hectare of seed onions yielded almost 9 percent more and an average of more than 50 tons was removed from the field.
Again as a spoilsport
In the other parts of the country, onion yields were comparable to the 2022 harvest. In western Netherlands In the Netherlands, the gross yield per hectare has been structurally lower in recent years by around 38 tonnes. Yields in Zeeland are increasingly under pressure. Salinization and a lack of freshwater during the growing season make it increasingly difficult to achieve good yields there.
The fact that the harvest of consumption potatoes was disappointing was also due to the weather. Due to the heavy rainfall in the autumn, not all plots could be cleared. Here and there there are still spuds in the ground. According to CBS, this concerns a few percent of the 75,000 hectares where potatoes are grown.
The weather also played a negative role in the grain harvest. Due to the wet spring, summer grains could not be sown or could only be sown late. As a result, the grains of wheat are smaller in some places than last year. The gross yield per hectare for both spring wheat and spring barley was at the lowest level since 2000.