Robert Dasher knows a thing or two about growing Vidalia onions. He brought his first crop to market 53 years ago. Sure, it was just a single acre. Then again, he was only 10 years old.

The Dasher family has been farming in the Vidalia region since 1945. Robert and his brother, the late Gerald Dasher, followed in their father’s footsteps and partnered up as G&R Farms in Glennville, GA, in the 1960s. In 2013, Gerald was inducted posthumously into the Vidalia Onion Hall of Fame.

“Way back when we first started the Vidalia onion wasn’t well known and it wasn’t defined — it was just an onion,” Robert Dasher said. “But when people started looking at it from the aspect of being milder and sweeter, they started to want them more and more —they’d been eating them but didn’t know what they had.”

Members of the Dasher Family at the 2013 Vidalia Onion Hall of Fame Awards, where the late Gerald Dasher was inducted.The Vidalia’s popularity has grown year by year ever since and the 2015 crop looks good in the field despite weather extremes that have seen very cold days followed by very warm ones over the last few weeks, Dasher said.

“The onions look good, ours and just looking at other people’s riding around,” Dasher said. “Overall, we don’t have a perfect stand and I didn’t see too many that do have a perfect stand, but I think we’re going to have a 90 percent stand. I’ve seen years where we’d have 95 or better. But I don’t care if you’ve been growing them 100 years, you won’t find two years exactly the same.”

If the Vidalia deal has come a long way in 53 years, so has G&R. Enhanced food-safety standards are a part of daily life.

“We’re stressing more and more food safety and traceability,” Dasher said. “Whatever they want us to do, we’re going to do it and we do the very best job we can. We do everything possible.”

And with imports from Peru and elsewhere, “we’ve gotten to where we stay busy year-round,” Dasher said.

A diversified farming operation, G&R raises beef cattle, peanuts, grain and timber, and also grows its own onion plants from seed, a process that starts by Labor Day each year.

“Basically in Vidalia you’re doing something year-round,” Dasher said, whether it’s “transplanting onion seedlings to the fields around the first of November, unloading imports from Peru — there’s something every month of the year. And cattle don’t take holidays or Sundays off either.”