DAWSON - Dawson's success could make a person's eyes water.

Onions do that.

Kidco Farms can be peeled back layers to the pearl of an idea.

The outside layer is three partners, Van Amundson, Monte Benz and Rodney Holth, who were looking for a way to add more value to a high-value crop.

They had access to irrigated land in Kidder County and in 2001 started growing onions, a somewhat exotic crop more common to the dry and temperate zones of eastern Oregon and Texas than North Dakota.

But Kidder's light sandy soil, coupled with an inch or so of water a week, is as right for onions as it is potatoes, providing untimely frosts don't rot the harvest.

Learning the tricks to growing onions is one thing. Reliably, they can produce some 12 million pounds of yellow Spanish onions a year, just about 20 pounds for every man, woman and child in the state. The yellow Spanish onions come out of the field the size of a softball, uniform in their dusky paper jackets.

To market and capitalize on their added value is quite another.

There were some tough, trail and error years. They lost two crops and hassled with shipping onions topped and peeled to various individual buyers, finally concluding that volume shipping was the only way to go.

Now, the partners are finally onto something on the marketing side. It's the second firm layer.

Kidco Farms just outside tiny, but comely Dawson, has vaulted to being the second-largest employer in the county.

The facilities with 36-degree-controlled warehouses, built originally to store potatoes, and the onion processing area is the third layer.

The fourth layer is the 52 white-jacketed, hair-netted workers who wear good support shoes and take two shifts a day to fill onion orders that leave on semi trucks three times a week for eventual distribution through one of the country's largest retailers.

The onions are part of a quartet of vegetables - potatoes from the Red River valley, along with celery and carrots from California - that are cleaned and dipped into a water-based solution that keeps them fresh. The prepped vegetables are run through an assembly line, placed into sealed bags at the rate of 20 bags a minute, boxed and shipped to Iowa. They're paired with beef roast and seasoning for a ready-to-slowcook pot roast dinner for sale in a big box store near you.

The aroma of onions is outside and more sharply inside Kidco Farms, where it takes workers awhile to get used to working with them.

Some never do, said Amundson. The discard onion peels, about 10 tons a week, go to a local feedlot.

The workers are a critical layer to the operation. When Kidco Farms signed on the pot roast blend contract back in July, the company sent buses over to Fargo and Bismarck to pick up day labor.

Amundson said the owners worked 27 days straight to gear up the plant and get the pot roast orders out after that first contract was signed.

"We just did it," he said. "At one point, I was here for 72 hours."

Now, most workers are employed on a permanent basis for $10 to $11.50 an hour plus benefits, including some health insurance and sick and vacation leave

For many, it's a decent second income.

Amundson said Kidco Farms is poised to add another shift because the company it contracts with - Inn Foods - is adding two more retailers and needs 50 percent more than the 120,000 pounds shipped now each week

The company has had some help along the way, including from the Lewis and Clark Regional Development Council.

The council and other financial support is the fifth layer.

Brent Ekstrom, who directs the council's commercial lending, said Kidco Farms fits the ideal of economic development in rural North Dakota.

It's the real McCoy by people committed to adding value to agriculture, not some get-rich scheme, he said. That's the innermost layer, the pearl of the idea.

"We stuck with them from the beginning," he said. "They've really turned the corner here with this new contract."

Amundson said Kidco Farms "wouldn't be here" without Lewis and Clark.

It appears that the humble onion, staple in every pantry, may be finally gaining the value added by three visionaries.

"If you can't grow them … well, you can't do it without growing the onions," said Amundson.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511, or lauren@westriv.com.)