Crying Shame: Onion Farmers Brawl Over Vidalia Harvest Times

Onion farmers in Georgia plant their Vidalia seedlings in early fall for a spring harvest. After waiting seven months for their crop to reach maturity, you can’t blame an onion farmer who’s feeling itchy to harvest once the last frost passes. But for an iconic crop, one of the U.S.’s most researched, marketed and fussed over commodities, there’s more at stake than a farmer getting from field to market first. Rules are in place to ensure quality and brand identity, and those guidelines include when a grower can first pick Vidalia onions.

Still, if you up and push back the first date that a Vidalia onion farmer can harvest his sweet varietal, you better lawyer up.

Moses Colman grew the first sweet Georgia onion in the city of Vidalia in the 1930s. More than 50 years passed, though, before Vidalia became the massive agribusiness force it now is in Georgia. In 1986, the state legislature passed the Vidalia Onion Act, restricting the onion’s growing region to 20 counties in the southwest part of the state and cementing the state department of agriculture as the official owner and arbiter of the brand.

Farmers must register with the state if they plan to grow under the Vidalia umbrella, and must keep the ag commissioner aware of what varieties are being grown.

Delbert Bland, Georgia’s most prolific Vidalia producer, filed suit against the state’s agriculture commissioner Gary Black this fall after the commissioner pushed back the starting date at which Vidalia farmers can harvest, pack and ship their onions to market. Bland, though, is in a rush. He doesn’t see the point in waiting, and come April, wants to get his onions to market as soon as possible.

Farmers must register with the state if they plan to grow under the Vidalia umbrella, and must keep the ag commissioner aware of what varieties are being grown.

The Vidalia Onion Act gives Black this power. The Georgia Department of Agriculture owns the brand, so Black can do whatever he sees fit to protect it. And the majority of growers are behind him.

When poor quality onions began showing up on grocery store shelves following the usual April 15 start date, Black decided to act. He was asked to by onion growers who knew the year’s harvest had been rough. A wacky spate of weather early in 2013 meant Vidalias weren’t as mature as they should’ve been come April. After a decade-plus-long drought, the state, and its onions, spent the early part of the year submerged. So after April 15, moist and soft onions ”“ shelf unstable, not as ripe as expected ”“ began making their way into consumer hands.

Vidalias are known around the world for their firmness and sweetness. Something in the soil in the restricted growing area where the onions are sold, the legend goes, produces an onion with a lower pungency compared to other varieties that’s perfect for grilling. Come April every year, consumers clamor for the onion, spurred on by a multi-million dollar marketing campaign incorporating smiling celebrity chefs.

So in 2014, with a brand name on the line, the state isn’t taking any chances.

“We’ve got the only commodity that I know of that’s marketed like this,” says Vidalia Onion Business Council director Bob Stafford. “So that’s why we protect it. If we don’t keep the name worth using, we don’t have anything.”

The suit, if it’s settled, won’t reach an end until March at the earliest. Stafford says Black was entirely in the right, legally, and describes Bland and his allies as a very small minority.

Something in the soil in the restricted growing area where the onions are sold, the legend goes, produces an onion with a lower pungency compared to other varieties that’s perfect for grilling.

Vidalia onions, though, are no strangers to controversy.

Onion growers have at times been the brand’s own worst enemy. In 2004, an insect pest called thrips carrying the devastating iris yellow spot virus, which creates lesions on the crop that must then be destroyed, attacked the year’s bounty. The pests had hitchhiked into the country in shipments of Peruvian onions, which are processed in south Georgia packinghouses. The virus cost Geogia’s Vidalia growers $75 million.

By definition, Vidalia onion season extends from April through September and no longer. But consumers aren’t too seasonally attuned, so Georgia Vidalia growers import sweet onions and market them without the Vidalia logo but with eerily similar packaging, to appease eater’s year-round desires. But those Peruvian sweets brought along that blight, and it soon transferred to the local soil. Around Georgia, the thrips crisis, and its global ties, made headlines in the rural growing area and around urban Atlanta.

Indeed, few vegetables are as newsworthy as Vidalias. When the Georgia state legislature instituted strict anti-immigrant laws in 2011, the oft-conservative, Republican leaning agricultural community sided with liberal groups to fight the legislation. Why? Vidalias, despite scientific innovation to extend the crop’s storage life, are still harvested by hand. Migrant hands. Onion leaders and the State Farm bureau warned that no one would be around to pick or plant the state’s signature vegetable. But the lawmakers didn’t listen. Governor Nathan Deal’s response: send inmates out to the fields, an act that did nothing to dispel vicious chain gang stereotypes about the South.

University of Georgia scientists working to keep improving the onion have even advocated that the 20-county growing region outlined by the Vidalia Onion Act is too narrow. That special something in the soil isn’t that special, they argued. You can imagine the uproar such an idea caused. It made the New York Times.

Even the concentrated, defined Vidalia marketing effort is itself the product of litigious competition, according to the writings of agriculture historian Tore Olsson, whose essay “Peeling Back the Layers: Vidalia Onions and the Making of a Global Agribusiness,” published in the journal “Enterprise and Society” in 2012, serves as an educational backgrounder on the cash crop.

The jury, literally, is still out on whether or not the current outrage over the start date has any legs.

Stafford has a wait-and-see approach, though he’s firmly behind commissioner Black. To him, this supposed controversy revolves around a few growers jumping the gun to get to market. If everyone waits, the entire industry profits, he says.

“Some people think it’s a big deal, some people don’t,” Stafford says, breaking down the issue with folky simplicity. “Some people just want to get to market first. (The later start date) will stop a lot of that.”

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