Before Walla Walla became known for wine, it was famous for something else: “Home of the onion so sweet you can eat it like an apple.”

That line, a mainstay of marketing materials for the Walla Walla Sweet onion, graces the official promotional website for what is the official state vegetable.

Though true, it’s a bit exaggerated: While the onion is enjoyed raw, most people put thick slices on burgers or in salads rather than munching on the whole globe.

Michael J. Locati, a fourth-generation farmer descended from the Italian immigrants who first raised the onion in Walla Walla, is an exception.

“Every field, I usually try to eat an onion,” he said.

Locati, 27, has taken over the region’s largest onion-producing farm from his uncle, Michael F. Locati. He studied agricultural technology and business management at Washington State University and worked off the farm a few years before returning.

Onion farmers have dealt with the same pressure facing growers across Washington: get big or get out. Locati is part of a consortium that owns its own packing shed, and farms about 350 of the region’s roughly 500 acres, making the consortium by far the largest grower of Walla Walla Sweets.

Still, sweet onions remain a do-it-yourself heirloom crop in most ways. Farmers save their own seeds, and plants have been selected over generations of onions for desired traits: large globes, sweet flavor and winter hardiness.

Much of what happens in the fields is the result of tinkering by individual farmers.

“There’s no onion like this,” Locati said.

Sweet start

The onion’s Italian roots are still visible in the names of the region’s growers, many of whom are third- or fourth-generation descendants of the gardeners who bred the first Walla Walla Sweets. The Locatis are the biggest, but other growers include the Arbinis and Castoldis.

The official origin story for the onion is partially the result of educated guesswork undertaken by Joe J. Locati, a former district horticultural inspector and a descendant of the first Locati generation to grow the vegetable. Interviewing his uncle, he wrote down the family’s story about the onion’s origin in a 1976 essay, preserved in the Penrose Library archives at Whitman College.

The genesis of the Sweets can be traced to a Frenchman named Peter Pieri. He was a soldier stationed on the island of Corsica in the late 1800s with plans to move to Walla Walla. He’d heard the small town was good for gardening. He brought the onion seed prevalent in Corsica with him, and other Italian gardeners in the valley started growing it.

As Joe Locati recounts, the onion originally was planted for harvest in the fall, but not every onion sold, and farmers let them winter over.

“It was discovered, in this manner, that they were winter hardy,” he wrote.

Early accounts sometimes referred to the onion as a French variety brought to Walla Walla by an Italian immigrant. Joe Locati points out the irony of that account, since his research suggests the opposite: Pieri was a Frenchman, and the onion’s origin in Corsica made it Italian by heritage, if not by geopolitical boundaries.

A second strain of the onion came over with Giovanni Arbini, who migrated to Walla Walla from his native Italy around 1890. He did much of the early work refining the onion and selected varieties that matured in early June, weeks ahead of the usual July harvest.

Italian gardeners planted small fields of vegetables, with the sweet onion leading the way for the cottage industry.

“That variety, more than any other commodity, was responsible for the continuance and survival of the truck garden industry for more than 70 years,” Joe Locati wrote.

Extending harvest

The original Walla Walla Sweet, planted in September, stays underground during the winter and begins to put up stalks in the spring. They’re ready for harvest when the green stalks of the plant start to fall over, Locati said, typically in early June.

The problem? That overwinter onion harvest usually lasts only a few weeks, ending sometime in July. That makes it a difficult crop for farmers to market.

“Costco’s not going to buy onions if you’re only two weeks,” Locati said.

To extend their season, Walla Walla onion farmers use transplanted and spring-seeded onions.

Sarah McClure and her husband, Dan, grow about 28 acres of organic sweet onions and sell to natural markets and grocery stores. Every year, they ship seeds to Arizona over the winter and get back small plants that look like salad onions in March. The onions arrive back at the farm in small bundles and are re-planted. The re-planted onions will be available when the winter sweets stop producing.

Many farmers, including Locati, also plant spring sweets in March to harvest at the end of the season. That keeps growers in business until August.

The hope is to get the first crops out of the ground in time to hit stores by the Fourth of July.

“If we miss that July Fourth market and we don’t have onions available then, it’s really hard to catch up because everyone wants a big slab of sweet onions on their burgers on the Fourth of July,” McClure said.

Location matters

The onion’s characteristic sweetness is related to its water and sugar content, as well as the soil it’s grown in. Sweets have a higher water content, making them unsuitable for long storage. They’re also more sugary.

Most importantly, they have lower levels of pyruvic acid, the sulfur-containing compound that gives onions their distinctive pungency. Sweet onion varieties tend to have concentrations below 5 percent, while regular yellow onions are typically above 10 percent.

The Walla Walla Valley’s low-sulfur soils help give the onion its distinct sweet flavor. Farmers maintain that if you took the seed outside of Walla Walla and planted it in, say, a Spokane garden, the resulting onion wouldn’t be a true Walla Walla Sweet.

In 1995, the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a federal marketing order giving the Walla Walla Sweet region-protected status. An onion must be grown in defined boundaries within Walla Walla County and its southern neighbor, Umatilla County in Oregon, to be marketed as a Walla Walla Sweet.

There’s no well-funded crop research center in Washington for sweet onions. Instead, most agricultural research focuses on storage varieties of onions grown in the Columbia Basin, said Tim Waters, a regional vegetable specialist with Washington State University based in Pasco.

The state’s onion crop covers some 24,000 acres, making Sweets just over 2 percent of the state’s harvest, at 523 acres.

“It’s quite small, but in terms of marketing they’ve got the niche,” Waters said.

Perhaps no one is more passionate about the Walla Walla Sweet than Kathy Fry-Trommald, the now-retired executive director of the Walla Walla Sweet Onion Marketing Committee. Before leaving the post in June, Fry-Trommald spent 16 years traveling the country to promote the signature Washington onion, which was grown on 1,400 acres in its heyday.

There was a time when Walla Walla Sweets were the only sweet onion available west of the Mississippi, she said. Before produce was a global business, Vidalia onions grown in Georgia were available on the east coast and Walla Walla Sweets dominated the rest of the country. It wasn’t economical to ship across the country.

That changed in the early 2000s, when grocery stores started demanding a year-round sweet onion, she said. Shipping produce around the world got cheaper, and Vidalias, which are available earlier in the season, started appearing in the Northwest.

It’s not possible to grow a year-round sweet onion in any one part of the U.S., so new varieties started springing up: the Maui in Hawaii, the Imperial Valley Sweet in California and the Sweetie Sweet in Nevada.

“We don’t have our window anymore like we used to. Walla Walla Sweets used to have a few weeks in the summer where we didn’t have a lot of competition, but now it seems like every state in the country has a sweet onion they put out,” said Paul Castoldi, a third-generation Walla Walla Sweet farmer.

Fry-Trommald said those onions, many of which were developed by university crop research centers, just aren’t as good as a true Walla Walla Sweet. Few things make her as angry as imposter onions, she said.

“People will take any old onion and put it in a Walla Walla bag,” she said, a practice illegal under the federal marketing order. She recalled seeing a sign in a Whole Foods store recently advertising “LOCAL Pennsylvania Organic Walla Walla Sweet Onions,” a label so nonsensical that Fry-Trommold simply shook her head.

The increased availability of other types of onions has made life harder for growers. It’s one factor behind the onion’s declining acreage, which has hovered around 500 acres for the past few seasons. The other reasons are common across farms all over Washington: younger generations who don’t want to take over the family business and increased costs of labor.

“A lot of young people got out of it because of the money. It’s too volatile now, too up and down to rely on the income,” Castoldi said. His farm is one of the exceptions: He’s working the land with his brother, Bob, and his nephew, Nathan, who’s in his 30s and planning to take over.

While sweets were once the mainstay of Italian immigrants’ gardens, today the crop is typically one piece of a diversified business. Like many crops, onions are rotated to preserve soil nutrients. The Castoldis, McClures and Locatis all grow other crops: alfalfa, pea and corn seed, asparagus and other vegetables.

Locati knows he’s one of a few people his age taking over the onion business, but he’s eager to keep the family tradition alive.

“You survive this long, you can’t fail now. It’d be embarrassing.”

Throwing out the ceremonial first pitch is a standard part of any baseball game.

But Walla Walla is probably the only place in the world that throws a sweet onion.

Borleske Stadium, home of the West Coast League’s Walla Walla Sweets, is just one of a handful of places around town where visitors are reminded of the region’s connection to Washington’s state vegetable.

Though the town has gained prominence as a wine tourism destination, with world-class restaurants and tasting rooms taking up much of the downtown real estate, the city has a few onion-related quirks.

One is a tradition at Whitman College, dating back to the early 1990s, where the admissions office mails a box of sweet onions over the summer to each student in the incoming freshman class.

John Bogley, the college’s vice president of development and alumni relations, said the tradition was inspired by an alumnus of the college, Carl Schmitt, who ran a bank in Palo Alto. Every year, he had a truckload of onions delivered to the bank as a thank-you to customers for their business. Schmitt told the story to then-college president Tom Cronin, who adopted it.

The onions are packed in the field in boxes of six, then mailed to students with a letter explaining their origin. Locati Farms supplies the onions now, though Whitman has used different suppliers in the past, Dean of Admissions Tony Cabasco said.

“We really want to find ways to celebrate Walla Walla and the community here, and I think that’s kind of a nice way to also do that,” he said.

Every year, he said, he gets a few calls from students in the spring who have been admitted and want to know where their onions are. Cabasco has to explain that they’re only for students who actually decide to enroll.

International students can’t receive them thanks to the difficulty of shipping produce abroad. Cabasco said some students receive their box, which has holes in it, and think the college has sent them a hamster or small dog.

The annual cost to the college is about $10,000 a year, and shipping costs more than the onions themselves. The tradition was on a list of nonessential programs considered for cuts during the 2008 recession, when the college’s financial aid needs rose, but Cabasco said the entire office was opposed.

“It’s a thing at Whitman, and we can’t not do it,” he said.

For the Walla Walla Sweets, onions aren’t just a projectile. They’re the core of the baseball team’s brand.

The team’s mascot is Sweet Lou, a surprisingly endearing winking onion with legs who roams around the stadium high-fiving kids and runs a number of contests between innings. He frequently races children around the bases, though thanks to his size 19 feet, he rarely wins those contests.

The Sweets’ website describes him as the “friendliest and most energetic onion you’ll ever meet,” noting that he sleeps in an onion patch at night but otherwise lives at the ballpark.

Sweets President Zachary Fraser declined an interview request on behalf of Sweet Lou.

“Lou’s a silent onion,” Fraser explained. “He needs an interpreter.”

Fraser moved to Walla Walla to form the team in 2009, and worked with a sports branding agency to come up with the Sweets brand. He had the finished logo done before fans officially voted on a team name, but fortunately the signature onion won by a wide margin.

The onion mascot, with his visor and wink, was part of the package. Fraser chose to announce the new team in a press conference at Sharpstein Elementary School, where children were given rally towels to cheer. After the announcement, Fraser took questions and one student asked him what the onion was named.

“I’d thought of everything,” he said, except, somehow, a name for the team mascot. “On a whim, I blurted out Sweet Lou and everybody cheers.”

The name earned him flak from one of the team’s owners, Jeff Cirillo, a former Mariner whose conflicts with former manager Lou Piniella are well-documented. But the name stuck.

Because the Sweets rely on college baseball players, the roster changes year to year. That makes it hard to build a fan following based on star players, so Sweet Lou fills the gap.

“Sweet Lou has become a face that we can market year in and year out,” he said.

Fraser said he hopes the team can help preserve the onion’s place in Walla Walla history, even as the wine industry grows in prominence.

“The first thing people came to know Walla Walla for was the onion,” he said. “We don’t want to lose that.”

It takes a crew of onion pickers just a few hours to transform a field from a sea of knee-high green to a dusty-brown collection of onion bulbs.

After farmers drive over with a tractor to undercut the bulbs, workers stream through, grabbing the loose onions and pulling them up. By late June, the harvest has been pushed back as early as 3 a.m. so crews can finish before the worst heat of the day begins.

The field takes on the sweet, slightly pungent smell of a fresh onion as workers make a second pass. Bent over, they grab a fistful of onions with practiced hands and shear the tops off, throwing the bulbs into a nearby box.

“Harvesting onions the way we do it is one of the hardest jobs there is,” said Harry Hamada, a second-generation onion farmer who manages the Walla Walla River Packing Shed. Few crops, aside from asparagus, demand as much repetitive, bent-over labor.

But after 30 years in the fields, Mauro Lopez said it’s not so bad.

“I have experience. I can’t say it’s very hard,” he said, speaking in Spanish.

Lopez, 57, came to Walla Walla in 1986 through a contractor to harvest Walla Walla Sweets. He’s a native of Oaxaca, Mexico, a state in southern Mexico bordering the Pacific Ocean where many U.S. farm workers come from.

Unlike many in the industry, Lopez is a U.S. citizen. He and his wife have a house in Walla Walla, and his daughter just graduated from Eastern Washington University with her teaching certificate, which causes him to beam with pride.

“All my life, I’ve worked here in the fields so my daughter can get ahead,” he said.

Lopez said the majority of onion harvesters he’s worked with over the years are in the U.S. illegally, though growers require a Social Security number from employees. He doesn’t think it’s likely those workers will be able to apply for amnesty or legal status in the U.S.

“I don’t think they’re going to give papers,” he said, referring to the federal government under President Donald Trump.

Hamada grew up working on his uncle’s onion farm. His parents and uncle lived in Kent, Washington, before World War II, but were interned during the war as people of Japanese heritage. They lost the farm and had nothing to go back to, so they moved to the Walla Walla area to farm after the war ended.

Vertical integration through the packing shed is one reason they’ve been able to stay in business. He and his brothers invested in their first packing facility around 1992 to give them more control over the final product being shipped to stores.

If supermarkets don’t like the quality of the onion, “it all falls back on the grower,” Hamada said. The current shed opened around 2000 to give them more space.

During harvest, a crew of about 60 people dries, sorts, packs and loads the onions. Women work on an inspection line, finding reject onions with cuts or blemishes that will be destined for fast food. Men drive forklifts, loading the semitrucks destined for Albertsons and Costco.

Earlier this summer, a few young men loading onions into bags were working in the plant as a summer job. Diego, who did not want to give his last name, said he’ll be heading to EWU in the fall to study business. He works with another young man shoving small, consumer-size bags of medium onions into boxes to ready them for shipping.

Onion farmers say labor is increasingly a challenge for them. Harvesting the globes is labor-intensive, and farmers face dual pressures: increased costs due to a rising minimum wage, and more difficulty filling open jobs.

This season, Hamada installed a new labor-saving machine that automates part of the sorting process, allowing him to cut the crew by about 10 people. He said he made the decision before the minimum wage went up, but that validated his decision.

Michael J. Locati, a fourth-generation sweet onion farmer who’s recently taken over his family’s share in the main growing consortium, said his workers asked for an increase in their piece rate, which is based on how much they harvest.

Workers are paid per 50-pound box they fill, and experienced workers can earn well above minimum wage, especially if the onions are larger. Because the state minimum wage was raised to $11 an hour at the beginning of the year, Locati gave his workers about a 20 percent raise on their piece rate this season.

He’s not opposed to the increase, but said people in urban areas need to recognize it’s going to impact the cost to produce their food.

“That’s great,” he said of the increase. “I think everyone deserves to be successful, but it doesn’t mean you’re not going to have to pay more.”

Hamada and Locati are part of the same growing consortium, which raises about 350 of the roughly 500 acres of Walla Walla Sweets in the area. This year, for the first time, they’ve brought in 13 workers on H-2A visas, which are for temporary agricultural workers.

Farmers often shy away from the visa program, which requires employers to house workers, transport them and guarantee a prevailing wage above the state minimum (though most will earn more at the piece rate). But Locati said this year they wanted to try it because workers have gotten harder to find.

Longtime workers like Lopez were part of a generation that was able to get amnesty and citizenship. They raised children who got an education and have choices besides working in onion fields. Locati doesn’t fault anyone for wanting better; it’s the same thing his grandparents did. But he said immigration restrictions have made it difficult for farmers to get a new generation of workers.

“We’re not getting replacements because it’s so hard to get across the border, it’s so hard to get a visa,” Locati said.

The onion harvest season overlaps with apples and cherries, so farmers compete for a scarce labor pool.

“Our government thinks that Americans will do that work. They’re kidding themselves,” Hamada said.

Labor isn’t the only difficulty growers face.

Increased competition from other sweet onions has made their product more difficult to sell, and Hamada worries about the future of the crop since many growers are aging out.

“Everything’s a challenge,” Hamada said with a laugh.