Cycle Updates · Pwalugu, Talensi District, Upper East Region
3 Nov 2025 – 6 Apr 2026
Our first onion cycle, grown at Pwalugu the way the local outgrowers have long done it themselves — a season with real setbacks, and the most instructive one we've run so far.
Dry-season cycle opens at Pwalugu, run under the outgrowers' own established growing method rather than our standard playbook.
Seedling losses in the nursery, followed by an urgent, costly scramble to source replacement seedlings from other farmers.
Harvest brought forward to get ahead of the rains; cycle closes out below the yield we'd projected.
Cycle 1 was our first season working with outgrowers at Pwalugu, in the Talensi District of the Upper East Region — a dry-season, irrigated onion crop grown the way the local farming team have long grown it themselves, rather than a method we brought in. It taught us more than any cycle since.
It started with the land itself: the plot sat close to the waterside, which looked like an asset, but came with a persistent nutsedge grass problem that wasn’t flagged clearly enough before we took it on. Clearing and controlling it became an ongoing task through the season, and it’s now something we screen for much more rigorously before committing to a new plot.
The nursery phase was the costliest lesson. We leaned on a personal connection to raise it rather than running it ourselves end-to-end, and corners were cut we shouldn’t have accepted — under-seeding relative to what the plot needed, no fungicide seed treatment, and a thinner feeding programme than the crop needed early on. That led to real losses once the seedlings went to field, and a rushed, expensive scramble to buy in replacement seedlings from other farmers at short notice. It’s directly why later cycles have gone in with enough seedlings sourced up front, plus a buffer.
Harvest was brought forward earlier than we’d have liked, partly to avoid a repeat of the previous season’s harsh late rains — rains that, this time, never really came — and partly because some of the bought-in seedlings weren’t at the transplanting stage we wanted, so timelines shifted regardless. Without storage of our own, the crop had to move straight to market, and we came away from the sale process with a clearer picture of how exposed that leaves a farmer at the point of sale. Storage is still the goal — and building direct buyer relationships beyond the local market, ahead of harvest rather than after it, is one of the concrete changes that’s come out of this cycle.
The nursery lessons from this cycle also fed into a peer-reviewed study on planning seedling density for smallholder farms — read more in our news post.
