Nothing stirs the blood quite like racing against a clock. Those in fresh produce have adapted to running at a breakneck speed, and it hones a mind ready to turn challenges into solutions.
One such mind is none other than Bland Farms® Troy Bland. The supplier’s Chief Executive Officer knew that the recent purchase of a Vidalia® onion facility spelled opportunity, and he and the team immediately went to work so the facility could deliver on a long-anticipated goal of Troy’s: a shorter harvest season.
Troy Bland, Chief Executive Officer, Bland Farms®: Bland Farms’ philosophy—and by extension, my philosophy as CEO—is that I trust Mother Nature. Still, I want to take as many variables out of the equation as I can. Getting onions out of the field as soon as possible is the easiest way to do that. That puts us in the driver’s seat.
My goal is to control when we harvest. Mother Nature can hold onions a little longer, but not too long. You want to be at the peak of that curve, not on the downward side.
Competitors have worked against us by trying to prolong the season and make later-season varieties a priority. To me, early-season varieties are best because they eliminate the weather factor. April is historically drier than May in southeast Georgia, so the sooner I can get onions out of the ground, the better pack-out I can get, and a better pack-out means a more shelf-stable onion for my retailers.
TB: The Vidalia facility, which we’ve leased for a number of years, is part of the 1.4 million boxes of onions we store yearly. It will be the largest storage facility in the industry—even bigger than our home site, with the capacity to store over 400,000 bushels. That will bring us to a total of 1.5 million boxes in storage a year.
This increased capacity allows us to be much more efficient in getting our onions out of the field, into a dryer, into a cold room, and into their final resting spot. We’re trying to take out the long ‘fresh season’ of Vidalias—getting them harvested and in storage as soon as possible so we’re not dealing with onions that stayed in the fresh season too long.
TB: Today, Bland Farms still has more traditional drying rooms than anybody else in the industry, and we have hybrid rooms—which can dry and cool in the same room without moving the onions. Less movement means less jostling.
We’re going to use the same technology we’ve been using at our main farm in Glennville, Georgia, since 2020, which is a secondary cooling system with glycol for a hot loop and a cold loop. We’ll be running glycol at temperatures of 120° F and 28° F. That allows us great temperature variation. It also allows us to control humidity—something we learned from the cannabis industry. We took that knowledge and applied it to onions.
What used to take us almost a month to get onions to temperature now takes about 14 days from plowing to harvest. What used to take four weeks now takes 7–10 days, so we’ve doubled drying capacity. It is a much more efficient system. Instead of having to use 55 million BTUs of natural gas per hour to dry 120,000 bushels of onions, the new rooms use 3 million BTUs per hour to dry 300,000 bushels.
TB: We’re very safe and very knowledgeable about how to use ammonia refrigeration. Ammonia is 30 percent more efficient than a Freon system of the same size.
It’s a smart practice, and it’s more sustainable. At the farm, we took out 77 compressors and replaced them with three. At the Vidalia facility, we’re replacing 30 compressors with four smaller ones, and that’ll be ready for the season. We’ll be up and running in March.
TB: Our packing shed is on the cutting edge. The industry tried to automate everything at one point, then realized you need people. I knew enough about our process not to bring in full automation—we didn’t have the checkbook for that anyway. We automated the lowest-hanging fruit using AI to make the packing house what it is today. There is still no other packing house in the U.S. that packs and bags directly off the sizers the way we do.
I would prefer to sell 100 loads of Vidalia onions than 100 loads of Mexican onions because it helps my community. When we sell Vidalias, we’re investing back into the people who make Bland Farms what it is and who put southeast Georgia on the map for sweet onions.
Backed by generational expertise and driven by a desire to perform well in the market, Troy Bland brings a solid strategy to the regional staple that is Bland Farms. 
