Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, June 5, 1990                   TAG: 9006050122
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARILYN MILLOY NEWSDAY
DATELINE: VIDALIA, GA.                                LENGTH: Medium

DON'T SHED ANY TEARS FOR VIDALIA, GA.

Not that the people here advise it. Better to slap the succulent delights between two slices of bread with mayonnaise, some will tell you, or better yet, throw them into a pound cake. Whatever the method, the point still is this: The Vidalia onion is sweet, sweet, sweet - the sweetest, its boosters claim, in all the world.

It is the reputation of the Vidalia, a reputation sworn to for years by people from New York to California, that has put this town of 12,000 people on the map and made the growing of onions a $25 million annual industry here.

Researchers have found that in the 30-mile area around Vidalia, the sandy, low-sulfur soil somehow conspires with the mild winters to make the Vidalia onion ("yellow granex Type F hybrid" in onionese) come out even milder than the sweet onions grown from the same seed in Walla Walla, Wash., and Maui, Hawaii. One test showed that the sugar content of a Vidalia is actually higher than that of a Coca-Cola - which hardly means, people here quickly warn, that the Vidalia is sugary.

"Our sweet onions won't make you cry or give you bad breath," boasted Flossie Hayes, a retired schoolteacher who is on the local executive committee planning the town's 100th birthday celebration in October. Hayes noted that although the focus of the celebration will be the people of Vidalia, it will be impossible to pull things off without mentioning the contribution of the sweet onion.

It's definitely a different onion, said Harold Wright, one of about 250 onion farmers in the area. Only thing, said Wright, farmers here have only scratched the surface in capitalizing on its uniqueness.

Now growers like him are aiming to change that. For the first time this year, some are using cold storage to make the easily perishable onion available well past the traditional, and quite short, May-through-June season.

Growers say that if the process can be made to work on a large scale, the impact in 10 years could be profound for this economically depressed area, called "the other Georgia." Farmers reported a loss totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars two years ago when a bumper crop meant the onions had to be sold cheaply. With cold storage, farmers can now market their Vidalias - which often command three and four times the price of the hotter Bermuda variety - year-round, aggressively and nationwide.

"South Georgia is suffering badly, and this may well be an answer since it could triple the economy down here," said Robin Raiford, manager of the Vidalia Onion Committee, which was formed last year to help develop new research projects.

Doyle Smittle, a professor of horticulture at the University of Georgia's Coastal Plain Experimental Station, is even more optimistic. He predicted that with an additional change, from hand to mechanical harvesting, the Vidalia onion could conceivably become the Washington apple of the South, directly putting up to $300 million a year into the economy by the year 2000.

And for people like Steve Coleman, who grows onions, that is not such a far-fetched idea.

"It wouldn't seem like an onion could cause all this commotion, but people have been flooding in here and calling for 50 years, saying these are the best, the very best onions," said Coleman, whose late grandfather, Moses Coleman, was the first to discover 60 years ago that onions grown on Vidalia soil were decidedly different.