- I'm Tyler Harper.

As your agriculture commissioner, I have the honor of representing one of the hardest working groups of people in our state, our farmers.

That's why we invite you to take the Georgia Grown Challenge.

Try any Georgia specialty crop against any other state's produce, and you'll pick Georgia Grown.

(bright playful music) - [Announcer] Community, learning, working, playing, celebrating.

Doing life is always better together.

At GPB, we aim to provide you with the tools to be able to do life together well.

Our mission to educate, inform, and entertain inspires everything from our wide range of programming to our stimulating radio conversations, to our fun in-person events, we've got something for everyone.

Visit gpb.org/community to learn more about our upcoming events.

- I'm Tyler Harper.

As your agriculture commissioner, I have the honor of representing one of the hardest working groups of people in our state, our farmers.

That's why we invite you to take the Georgia Grown Challenge.

Try any Georgia specialty crop against any other state's produce, and you'll pick Georgia Grown.

- The fascinating and ever-changing world of agriculture.

(gentle music) Let's hit the road here in Georgia and meet the farmers, producers, makers and bakers who keep us all fed and keep us coming back for more.

Straight ahead at "A Fork in the Road."

(rugged music) ♪ Mm, mm-mm ♪ ♪ Mm, mm-mm ♪ ♪ I came from the mud ♪ ♪ There's dirt on my hands ♪ ♪ Strong like a tree ♪ ♪ There's roots where I stand ♪ - [David] Georgia farmers, artisans, merchants and producers, we depend on these men and women every day of our lives through the choices we make and the food we consume.

Their strategy and approach is always shifting, but the end game remains the same: results.

(spirited music) Pot-ay-to, pot-ah-to, tom-ay-to, tom-ah-to.

Let's call the whole thing off.

Or better yet, let's dive a little deeper into these tasty fruits and veggies and maybe sprinkle a little Vidalia onion on there to make this episode even sweeter.

And to do that, we head down to Vidalia onion country in Glenville, Georgia, the region where this sweet onion phenomena took root.

(mellow music) It all started in the early 1930s when a man named Moses, or Mose, Coleman, realized that the onions growing in this neck of the woods weren't quite as hot.

They were, in fact, sweet.

Well, over the next few decades, word of this special onion growing in this specific part of the country began to spread.

The Bland family jumped into the growing business of farming these onions in 1982, and this is where Delbert Bland takes over to share the tale of this unique onion and the Bland family story.

- Me and my father were farming together and we ended up planting five acres of onions one year, had no idea what we were doing.

We produced them that year, produced one truck load and had nowhere to go with 'em.

We didn't know where to sell 'em.

Nobody had never heard of Vidalia onion at that time.

It wasn't even named Vidalia yet.

So long story short, we end up putting them under my mama's carport and my cousin, come to find out, was a produce buyer for Winn-Dixie.

So he sends a truck the next day to pick up the onions and they load a load of onions up and we finally sold 'em.

So you know, that's how we began.

(rustic music) Glenville is where we live at, and that's where the majority of the onions are grown.

But in Vidalia, there used to be a Piggly Wiggly warehouse for grocery stores, and when the onions were grown, they would carry them to Vidalia.

And when they were distributed out in the stores, people say, "Hmm, this is a very good onion.

Where'd it come from?"

They said, "I don't know.

The truck come out of Vidalia."

So they had a war between the towns about whether they call it a Glenville sweet onion or a Vidalia sweet onion.

And the "Wall Street Journal" wrote a front-page feature article on the war between the towns about the onion.

And they said, "Who knows what name they'll end up with.

But whichever it is, it's the caviar of onions."

And Vidalia stuck and was born.

(pleasant music) This is a mature Vidalia onion.

You ready to be harvested.

This is called a short-day onion because it grows during the short days of the winter and is harvested in the spring.

Typical onions that you see in the store are the brown hot onions, they're long-day onions.

They're planted in the spring, grows in the long days of the summer and is harvested in the fall.

When it grows over the winter, it starts out with just a few rings and a couple of limbs.

Each one of these limbs supports a ring.

And when this onion gets ready and mother nature cuts the light on and says "It's time to get big," it starts pulling all the nutritions from this top limb and all from the bottom, and it meets in the middle here and forms this onion.

When everything is perfect and the weather's good, we'll actually grow 1/8" in diameter every 24 hours.

These rings, that's what makes that onion.

And each one of those rings are supported by this limb.

- [David] You have been holding that onion near your eyes and you're not crying.

- Oh no.

- There you go.

They only makes you cry when they're gone.

(onion crunches) Now that's a good onion.

- [David] Yeah, I'm jealous.

- And I'm telling you, I've never done this on camera before.

- Really?

- The entire time.

They all will tell you.

- (laughs) I feel special.

Thank you.

- Yeah, I'm telling you, I decided to do it.

It's really good.

- Yeah.

- It's great.

(bright music) - [David] From the field to the factory we go, where Delbert's son, Troy, who is now the CEO of Bland Farms, took me through the packing house.

- Vidalia onion is the fifth most recognizable names in produce.

Now that you go to the grocery store and you can get an orange 52 weeks a year, you can get a head of lettuce, a tomato, 52 weeks a year.

But there's still that excitement, there's still that passion when it comes to our Vidalias here yet.

Yes, we have other stuff that's good.

But Vidalia is the girl that brought us to the dance, so we're going to keep dancing with her.

(rugged music) These are actually onions coming from the field going into our rooms here to be dried down and brought down the temperature for long-term storage.

Once we get these onions down to temperature and cold, we actually pump ozone into the rooms so that we can use that to kill any pathogens that are in the air that could cause that onion to go bad.

Right here is my entire plant.

I can see what we're doing with the engine room, tells me which compressors are running, and what percentage they're putting out, and then I can go to plant overview.

This gives me a whole picture of what every onion we've got, and that 200,000 bushels that we have in transition between field, hot, cold, coming down to temperature, getting ready to go to other facilities once we get it cold here.

Here at Bland Farms, we have three different Ellison sizers and they're all powered by Ellipse Technology that does the brain work.

On grader one, we have a optical sizer.

Here, we size by weight.

All these onions individually get weighed and they go into a batch that makes a three pound, two pound, four pound, five pound, six pound, eight pound, ten-pound bag.

Each one of these baggin' machines takes that batch of onions, makes it a bag, and puts it into that bag that you see on your grocery store shelves.

(upbeat music) - [David] So what do you do when you have a whole bunch of sweet Vidalia onions and a hungry family to feed?

Well fire up the egg, grab some burgers and buns, and let the Blands show you how it's done down here in Glenville.

- So one of our favorite meals here on the farm on Friday afternoons is onion rings and hamburgers.

After a long, hard week of gathering onions, it's nice to come enjoy some hamburgers and onion rings with the family.

- [David] Tell me what's going on inside the foil here.

- So we are baking some onions in the foil.

We're using French onion seasoning in that, which is similar to the bouillon, but it has that French onion taste.

That's gonna be really nice.

- [David] I'm gonna trust your opinion on how to do this.

If anyone in the world knows (laughs) it's you guys.

- [Troy] To do it right, it really takes patience with onion rings because it is not the fastest process.

- [David] How long do they go for in there?

- About two or three minutes.

And then we're gonna have that nice golden brown that we have here.

- [David] So now that we know a little more about the most famous onion in the world and the best way to eat 'em, let's find out what the Bland family does when onions aren't in season.

And for that, we turn to Sand Candy.

(upbeat rustic music) - Oh, about five or six years ago, we started growing sweet potatoes.

We have a thousand acres now.

We had a lot of infrastructure that we needed for sweet potatoes from our onion operations.

- Things you have to have to produce the sweet potatoes, number one, is you gotta have land with water, irrigation.

Two, when you go to harvest, you need bins like containers to put 'em in.

And we own like 85, 90,000 of these bins because we have been in the onion business for many, many years.

You need the bins to be able to put the sweet potatoes in, and then when you get 'em in the bin, you need somewhere to store 'em.

So it works out great because all of our storage facilities is empty whenever we go to harvest sweet potatoes.

And the main thing is labor, and we have the same H-2A workers that we use for onions, we then use to harvest sweet potatoes.

So it's a win-win for everybody involved.

- The process we're going through today is we're plowing these potatoes up.

We just turned that bed over.

So we've got these potatoes put on a heel, is what they call 'em, potato heel.

And that heel, we come in with a blade and just flip that over so that the people can see what is underneath the dirt because none of these potatoes are exposed until we go to dig them.

Once they're dug, we go through and we sort those potatoes, jumbos, canners, No.

1s, and seed.

Once we get that done, we use our school buses here that allow us a efficient way to get it from the field to a staging area.

And then we load it on trucks and then we go to our storage facility.

- Yeah, we have to get through by a certain time of the afternoon so we can carry the kids back to school with the buses.

(all laugh) - [David] So I watch these workers in the field.

It looks like they're pulling perfectly good potatoes and they throw 'em to the side.

What are they doing there?

- Sweet potatoes has a lot of different sizes in there.

Anywhere from your canners, which are enormous, ones that strictly go to processors.

You have jumbos that some customers like, and then you have a No.

1, it's about a 12-ounce potato.

That's what the customer's looking for.

But each one of these people are trained to recognize that size of that potato.

Very rough grade.

We'll take it to the packing house and grade it with sizers there.

So we have a direct size of every potato that goes through there.

- [Delbert] One thing interesting about that is the size has nothing to do with the flavor of it.

Actually, whether it's a real big potato or a really small potato, the taste, the flavor's the same.

- [David] How big can these sweet potatoes get after you store it?

- Well, if you let 'em grow, they can get really large.

Right now, this crop behind me is almost at 115 to 120 days.

We try not to go much longer than that.

We're one of the few people in Georgia that grows sweet potatoes now.

But we really think there's great potential for this crop, especially with the way commodity prices are today.

There's a lot of domestic consumption of it as well.

And from the processing side of it is really where you see that growth.

A lot of dog foods have sweet potato products in it.

Of course, your sweet potato fries and different things.

We become more conscious as a society of healthier options for ourselves.

Sweet potato is a really good option out there versus your Irish potato.

(lively music) What we have here are sweet potatoes that we've harvested this year.

I've had 'em cured.

The skin is set and now we're ready to process them.

So we dump them into this tank very gingerly, and it gets in there and then they flow through.

We have some cleaning agents on it, then we size the very little ones out.

Then we go through and clean them again.

This brushing is our final clean that we do on it.

So the sizer that's behind us back here separates them by diameter into whichever category we need.

These are our smallest ones.

We call these petites, No.1s, jumbos, and our canner.

Once we have our canners and everything done, these go to be further processed in our bagging line, put into a bag, and then these are the ones that we will sell to our school systems, our retail accounts, so on and so forth.

This machine is actually making this bag, so it has two pieces of film, a label, and netting.

Glues it all together so we can make this bag into a three-pound bag, a four-pound bag, or a five-pound bag.

Whatever our customer likes is what we are able to provide to them with this machine.

(gentle music) Here at Bland Farms, we actually have a partnership with a company in North Carolina that we package all of our sweet potatoes under.

And that is the Sand Candy produce box.

So any sweet potatoes you find from Bland Farms has actually come from Sand Candy.

This product's been sized, cleaned, ready to go into our packaging so that it can go to a retailer near you or maybe your local cafeteria.

- When you see our sweet potatoes on the shelf, it is, number one, you know it's gonna be fresh because it hadn't been traveling on a truck for a long period of time because we're locally grown.

Two, it didn't come from across the water.

It come from Georgia.

This is land that you will never find nowhere else.

And my granddaddy and my granddaddy's granddaddy started this land and we continue the operation over the years.

- [David] Sweet potatoes and sweet Vidalias, grown and packaged with pride.

The Bland family plan to continue this proud tradition and continue sharing this story of the sweet little onion that could, and its sweet, sandy sidekick.

(rugged music) ♪ Mm, mm-mm ♪ Let's now journey from Glenville up to Canton, where a man inspired by music brings a rainbow of flavors to the world of tomatoes.

(lively music) This once-simple backyard lot in Canton, Georgia has become a breeding ground for over 200 varieties and multiple colors of heirloom tomatoes.

Bill Yoder, of the Yoder Family farms, studies tomato breeds from all around the world, the big, the small, the round, the not-so-round, heart-shaped tomatoes.

You see, these colors and these shapes do not happen by chance.

They're developed this way through science, meticulous research, and a whole lot of trial and error.

(upbeat music) - My name is Bill Yoder and I grow and breed and sell tomatoes, the seeds, and the plants in the spring, and the tomatoes to restaurants around Atlanta.

My background is math, computers, logic.

What got me into tomatoes was I wanted to learn more about gardening after I did my first garden when our daughter was born and decided I wanted to take a year sabbatical off of work and go work on a farm, find somebody that was really good and kinda learn all the ins and outs of farming.

And then once I got my first couple of seed catalogs and saw the diversity that was available that I didn't really know about prior to that, well then I was hooked.

I just wanted to grow everything I could and try them all.

The more I grew, the more I wanted to grow and find more varieties and more varieties and just keep adding to my collection and trying new things because every year I'll discover something great that I didn't have before.

(mellow music) There are probably eight or nine or 10 different kind of categorized colors of tomatoes.

You can have super, super tart tomatoes and you can have super sweet tomatoes like candy, or you can have really fruity or tropical fruity flavors.

They think they're less acid, but it's really, it's not the acidity that's different because the acidity is the same across all colors of tomatoes.

It's the amount of sugars.

Your flavor components are acids, sugars, and volatile compounds, kind of what makes up your flavor profile.

(soulful music) - [David] Tomato, fruit or vegetable?

- So botanically a tomato is considered a fruit.

So it develops from an ovary, from a flower, and it has seeds.

So just like apples, peaches, even botanically, cucumbers and squash and zucchini, are all, really, botanically fruit.

Mostly used as a vegetable, but it is a fruit.

(warm music) - [David] Explain heirloom.

- The most common definition that people relate to is it's a variety that's been passed through generations of families.

To be an heirloom, that has to be open pollinated, which means if you save those seeds, they will come true when you regrow them.

And that's how you're able to keep them going without them changing in any way genetically so they stay the same year after year after year.

Now, the last 15 years or so, breeding has become really popular, like what I do.

And so the term heirloom is used in a lot of seed catalogs for newer tomatoes that were created by crossing, naturally, cross pollinating two different heirloom tomatoes.

And so we kind of call those created heirlooms.

And once we cross them, then we take however many years that we need to stabilize 'em to the point where they will then be true if you save them.

So here's an example of tomato that was cross-bred with an anthocyanin tomato, which again, the original anthocyanin, purple, tomato was discovered decades ago on the Galapagos Islands.

So the purple development is the indication of the extreme levels of anthocyanin development, which is the same pigment antioxidant that you see in blueberries that makes them blue.

Now, what happens, though, is the expression of the anthocyanin will depend on the depend on the environmental factors.

Let me pick this one actually, if you'd like.

So notice how the purple anthocyanin expression is on top?

So that's the part the sun's hitting so that's why it's expressing not the bottom.

The sun never hits the bottom, so you never see purple develop on the bottom.

I could grow this same tomato in the wintertime here, and then the whole thing will almost be solid purple because it's got the cool environment that it needs to express more, and it's got the sunlight.

(jaunty music) - [David] Now the cool thing about breeding your own tomatoes means that you get to give them the name you want.

Bill is a fan of music bands from the 1980s.

So he likes to pay homage to a few of his favorite '80s-era musicians.

- So a child of the '80s here, I was a big new wave alternative music fan.

I got the idea about 10 years ago working with all these varieties and I decided I wanted to create a line after my favorite musician, Prince, from the '80s.

So I started crossing these purple tomatoes onto my short plants and creating a line of what I call Prince Tomatoes, where I named six different varieties that I crossed after his songs.

So that took me eight years and 11 generations to get them stable to where I finally released them to the public.

And then I started getting solicitations from all over the net for me to create other tomatoes named after songs from other '80s bands.

So I've got a Duran Duran line going, and a Depeche Mode line going, and I've got lots of requests, more requests than I'll ever have time to do.

It's become kind of a new niche thing for me that I really enjoy doing.

Always loved music and I love tomatoes so it's a great fit.

(rugged music) ♪ Mm, mm-mm ♪ - [David] So now that we are all fans of Bill Yoder's tomatoes, let's meet a top Atlanta chef who knows just what to do with these colors and flavorful varieties.

Off to THE CHASTAIN.

(gentle music) I think it's so cool.

You know, you're right here, Chastain Park, come around the side of the restaurant and you open up to this garden.

I bet most people don't even know this is here.

- That's true.

Actually, I had no idea it was here.

Somebody was actually trying to purchase this property for the better part of 10 years.

It was really the brains behind this.

And finally the previous owners were ready to sell and he needed a chef.

He asked me what it would take to leave the other restaurant.

I said, "A garden."

Then he said, "You're in luck."

(laughs) And then he brought us out here and I had goosebumps the first time I walked and saw, you know, the potential.

And especially when you get around back to the garden, there's so much opportunity and it's such a beautiful spot.

Having an onsite garden for us has really brought forward kind of my entire philosophy of food, especially with vegetables.

Fresh is best.

And it's something I learned when I was working out in California where we had a garden we were able to pick every single day, is that you really couldn't match, no matter what I do, whether salt, fat, acid, heat, I can't replicate freshness, which is why this is really such a special location to me, is there's not a lot of restaurants that get to have that connection to the garden that's so visible.

- Now, I just ran into a special gentlemen growing some special tomatoes and I think believe you know this same man.

- [Chris] He's insane.

(laughs) To say the least.

I don't know anybody else that's that hyper-focused on tomatoes, - [David] Right?

- [Chris] But it's really incredible.

It's that level of freshness.

It's something I learned, you know, in California we could pick it every single day, but you have people like Bill that can do the heavy lifting and supply a restaurant, which we wouldn't be able to do that here in our garden, let alone the catalog of tomatoes.

It's just unmatched.

- [David] Yeah, he brings some strands from Russia, all over the world.

And then there's some that you can only get in his little farm.

- Yes.

- [David] That's cool to be, for you to be able to serve something no one else can get other than a few other local chefs.

- It makes my job easier because when you have something that special and that unique, I just try to get out of the way.

What we do is we pair the best ingredients that we can together, and in this case we get the best tomatoes, a little bit of salt or fleur de sel, fine olive oil.

And that's really it.

And actually we pay homage to Bill on our menu.

It says Bill Yoder's Tomato Salad.

And we try to give everybody an array of tomatoes.

And what we try to tell the guests is, you may not fall in love with every single tomato, but you get to experience tomatoes and kind of everything that they can be so that you can have six or seven different bites of a tomato salad, and every one is unique and different.

(cheerful music) - This is the Bill Yoder dinner salad?

- Yes.

This is really an experience.

You get to try a lot of different tomatoes all in one dish, which unless you work with someone that's doing what Bill Yoder does, it's just impossible.

The best thing about this salad too, every time you come and have it at the restaurant, it's different.

These tomatoes are so incredible.

I don't want to mask the flavor of these tomatoes.

Isn't that beautiful?

It's like- - Yeah, that's so different.

- And yeah, see, it's another surprise every time we cut into 'em.

- This one's pretty too.

- That's like a tie dye.

- And we just have fun with the shapes.

So we want a bunch of different shapes.

So we're gonna hit these with a little bit of fleur de sel, which I love because this doesn't melt instantly, and that salt takes a little bit to dissolve.

We're gonna take, this is actually one of my favorite olive oils as well.

I like to be very liberal with, I use a lot of olive oil when I cook, but what's gonna happen is that salt's gonna draw the moisture out of the tomatoes and they're gonna start leaching a little bit of their liquid.

That actually becomes the vinegarette for this salad.

This is buttermilk ricotta where we actually use the buttermilk to acidulate and actually set the ricotta.

So all we'll do at the restaurant, 'cause we simply start arranging all these tomatoes on here.

So we get all these beautiful tomatoes on here so that each bite can really be individual of that.

(lively music) Now we're just going to add our torn croutons.

You'll see these kind of have a nice rustic appearance.

These croutons are swimming in this olive oil, but they're also soaking it up at the same time.

Beautiful, beautiful golden brown.

And now we're on a race against time because once these get cold, they're not quite the same as when they're really warm and it's kind of that explosion.

So I'm just gonna finish these with a little bit more salt over the top.

- [David] Yes, sir.

- And then we're gonna go to the salad.

This dish is fun, because, you know, the beauty lies in the tomatoes.

It's a little bit rustic, but when you try it, it's just absolutely delicious.

- And now, for the Bill Yoder Salad.

Can have this green one with the homemade olive oil croutons here?

(rustic music) This is phenomenal.

I could do this all day.

I like tom-ay-to.

I like tom-ah-to.

I also like homemade croutons, basil, and pretty much every '80s band-inspired tomato coming out of Bill Yoder's farm.

What a treat to learn the story of Bill's tomatoes, and see what a great chef can do with these amazing varieties.

But it's just as much fun to learn about the official state vegetable of Georgia and discover what else grows beautifully in the sandy, sulfury soil of Glenville, Georgia.

I'm David Zelski.

See you at the next "Fork in the Road."

"Fork in the Road" was brought to you by: (gentle music) - [Announcer] From produce to people, the best things are grown and raised in Georgia.

Even in tough times, we come together, work hard, and grow strong.

When you purchase Georgia-grown products, you support farmers, families, and this proud state we call home.

Together, we will keep Georgia growing.

(bright playful music) - [Announcer] Community, learning, working, playing, celebrating.

Doing life is always better together.

At GPB, we aim to provide you with the tools to be able to do life together well.

Our mission to educate, inform, and entertain inspires everything from our wide range of programming to our stimulating radio conversations, to our fun in-person events, we've got something for everyone.

Visit gpb.org/community to learn more about our upcoming events.