Delbert Bland has been around onions his entire life. He comes from a long line of farmers and it’s no surprise he cut his teeth behind the wheel of a tractor in Glennville, GA. And while Bland has made his mark as a first-rate marketer, he remains a farmer at heart.

That being the case, it amazes him that all these years later Bland Farms LLC does major business in Peru, a long ways away from south Georgia. Bland was instrumental in developing the Peruvian sweet onion industry, which has blossomed to provide category coverage during the Vidalia off season and is developing a reputation that comes very close to Vidalia’s finest.

“Life has changed a lot. It goes to show you move on with the times,” Bland said. “But Peru — years ago, I never could have imagined that. It seems like such a faraway place. Times have changed so much and communication is so different — with digital photographs and computers and cell phones, to us, farming in Peru is really no different than farming 30 miles away. Years ago, you’d have thought that wasn’t possible, to have an operation in another country. But it works really well because we’ve got good people working there and they’re very conscientious of what they do.”

Bland was one of the pioneers in opening the Peruvian sweet onion export deal. And while he’s quick to note that Peruvian sweet onions are certainly comparable to their U.S. counterparts, he still marvels that the product can come out of what is basically a desert region.

“The way they operate down there and what they do in a desert with nothing but irrigation water that comes out of the well is amazing,” Bland said. “We can produce an excellent onion down there and it won’t vary too much season to season — we get a little better yield, we have no disease pressure down there, it’s a very, very good match to our Vidalia deal. It’s worked very well for us — we actually finished up Vidalias the end of July and when we transitioned we already had 50 loads of Peruvians in-house the first of August.”

Bland’s Peruvian acreage will be up a little this year, but overall “when all is said and done we feel like we’ll have an average crop,” Bland said.

But when it comes to Peru, “average” is much more than that.

“It’s an excellent onion and that’s the reason it’s been successful,” Bland said. “You can market and you can talk but at the end of the day if you ain’t got a good product to back it up, all that’s for naught.”