Planning, new capacity gets G&R Farms off to banner start
Planning, new capacity gets G&R Farms off to banner start
G&R Farms in Glennville, GA, has been in the Vidalia onions business for 70 years. Each new season brings its own challenges and rewards — but this year has brought “blessings” beyond anything that Chief Executive Officer Walt Dasher could have imagined.
After a rugged growing season was redeemed by great weather in February and March, “We are really sitting in good shape,” Dasher said. “Our quality is phenomenal — basically what we’re looking at, we could have one of the better crops we’ve had in I don’t know how many years. From a size standpoint, we’re running 70-80 percent jumbo on our front end and that’s never happened before. We’re going to have organics ready to ship opening week (April 25), which is not normally the case until early May, so we’re very blessed there, and we’ve actually got a good percentage of jumbos in the organics, which is also unheard of. We’re tickled to death. The weather can change that but right now we’ve got a lot of storage space and a lot of places to put them and it looks like we’re going to have a banner Vidalia season.”
G&R makes improvements to its deal in the offseason, but the last few months have represented a significant change. Storage and drying capacity have been increased dramatically and for the second season in a row boxing and bagging lines were added. More importantly, G&R brought a next-level approach to planning out its season.
“I don’t want to give people the idea that we never planned before — we certainly did,” said Dasher, whose family has been farming in Vidalia since 1945. “But we really planned this year, we sat down and looked at last year and a calendar and just really planned out our season from start to finish very thoroughly, where we wanted to be come May, come June, come July, and we put a lot more time and effort and thought into it than before. We tried to do better on what varieties we planted when and to try to help us with our staging so we don’t have them all ready at one time and have more flexibility to harvest them at the peak time.”
The new approach to planning was necessary due to offseason acquisitions that will double storage capacity and increase drying capacity by 20,000 bushels.
“We were able to pick up some other sheds that people weren’t using and do some long-term rentals agreements and hopefully that will take us lot longer into the summer than before,” Dasher said.
