The onion crop was expected to be late in 2005 due to the loss of seedbeds and seedlings during the storm.

In Safwan, a town of 3,000 people on the Kuwaiti border, where allied and Iraqi commanders have held cease-fire talks, farmers are returning to harvest the region's onion crop.

The region produces about 20 percent of the country's onion crop from 20,000 acres of loamy black soil, exposed over the last century as farmers drained the swampy vestige of a 10,000-year-old lake of glacial meltwater.

When the onion crop is planted the spores germinate and enter the fresh seeds.

American producers visited here recently to study the possibility of exporting grapes to the United States during off-seasons and of timing sweet onion crops to place Petrolina produce on American Thanksgiving tables.

Mahuva also grows a large onion crop for export to other Indian states, and is the second-largest onion producer in India after Pune in Maharashtra.

The county has the second-largest concentration of muck soil in the nation, after the Everglades in Florida, and the largest area of such land used for onion crops.

"We came to Nairobi on June 12th with the first part of our onion crop, and they told us to come back for the money on the 30th," he complained.

The Webbs farmed together and increased their holdings until 1918, when a diseased onion crop wiped out all their savings.

They are on their knees, toiling in the afternoon sun, working the onion crops.