How Shuman Farms Scores Big Being a Game-Day Grower
December 6, 2023 John Shuman of Shuman Farms has drawn up the mother of all marketing game plans this season in his home state of Georgia — marry one of his loves, growing premium sweet onions, with the passion of so many fellow Georgians, college football. In turn, tailgaters at games involving the Georgia Bulldogs and Georgia Southern Eagles are feeling the char-broiled heat of one of the more unique promotional blitzes ever presented by a U.S. vegetable grower.
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As the newly named Official Sweet Onion Grower for both athletic programs, Shuman Farms, a 5,000-plus-acre grower/shipper headquartered in Reidsville, GA, provides a range of marketing and engagement activities for students, alumni, and fans representing each university.
Shuman, himself a fan of both schools, could not be more ecstatic over the opportunity to increase sweet onion awareness across a new and younger audience. The Bulldogs are college football’s two-time reigning national champions in Division I and, as of this writing, unbeaten in their first 10 games this season. Georgia Southern, with a 6-4 record at the same point, is his alma mater.
“We are so blessed. It’s really a first-of-its-kind partnership,” Shuman, President and CEO of Shuman Farms, says of the multi-year agreement. “One of the central themes that Shuman Farms has taken up is driving education to the next generation of shoppers. For us, that next generation of shoppers is attending these universities and colleges all over America, so this is picking fruit right from the tree, so to speak.”
Representing the fresh produce industry and vegetable growers means being “on the right side” of a healthy lifestyle issue currently facing the country, Shuman says.
“We’re just digging into this, and the possibilities seem to be endless,” Shuman says. “We’re excited about it. It is paying off. We’re getting some penetration and visibility and, again, raising awareness about fruits and vegetables, particularly sweet onions with us.”
In addition to the sponsorships at each university, Shuman Farms, for the second consecutive season, has negotiated NIL (name/image/likeness) endorsement deals with collegiate football players. Such associations had not been allowed by the NCAA before July 1, 2021. Shuman wasted no time taking advantage of the rules change, inking then-Georgia star quarterback Stetson Bennett to a deal in 2022 and following up similarly this year with Bulldogs wide receiver Ladd McConkey and Georgia Southern wide receiver Khaleb Hood and quarterback Davis Brin.
“I didn’t understand a lot about the NIL process, but it’s been good for us to be able to have access to those players and leverage their popularity,” Shuman says. “The partnership with Stetson gained a tremendous amount of media coverage because of his popularity and because it was a first of its kind. You hadn’t seen anything like that before with fresh produce. We got a lot of mileage out of that.”
Constant Demand, Constant Supply
Shuman Farms markets a variety of premium sweet onions, including the homegrown Vidalia. Arguably the state’s most famous agricultural product, Vidalia sweet onions are named after the southeast Georgia town in which it was historically grown in the early 1930s. (Shuman Farms is about 20 miles away in Reidsville.) The vegetable’s unusual sweetness stems from the low amount of sulfur in the region’s soil. In fact, state legislature limits the production area of the trademarked onions to 13 counties and portions of seven other counties.
Unfortunately, most years the locally grown sweet onions are available to consumers from only mid-April through August. As part of his awareness efforts, Shuman wants all Vidalia sweet onion fans — new and old — to realize his company has been growing the same premium sweet onions in Peru since 1998. Never-ending consumer demand is constantly met by the largest grower-importer of the vegetable from Peru into North America.
“We’re in the 52-week sweet onion business,” he says. “The Peruvian sweet onion industry was born out of the popularity and demand for Vidalias. You’ve got such an extended growing season, just ideal conditions, down in Peru below the equator.”
While secondary to its Georgia and Peru operations, Shuman Farms also has grower partnerships in Texas and New Mexico.
Restarting the Family Farm
That Shuman Farms survived in Georgia, let alone later thrived on another continent, is noteworthy.
John Shuman, now 54, and his three siblings grew up on what was the original Shuman Farms. They were in and around farming “24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” he says. “That’s all we ever saw our father doing.”
Buck Shuman, now 90, first owned Shuman Fertilizer Co., a farm supply dealership that sold chemicals, fertilizer, seed, and feed. He was one of the first people in South Georgia to blend liquid fertilizer for local farmers, John Shuman says.
“He did really, really well and got into farming in the 70s. He was row crop farming and then got into vegetable growing, primarily Vidalia sweet onions, in the 1980s,” John says. “But as everyone knows, in the 1980s the farm crisis was a very real thing and had a negative impact on a lot of family farms around the country. My dad was no different. He kind of got hit on both sides of the fence.”
Shuman Fertilizer went out of business first. The family’s farm followed in the summer of 1994. Coincidentally, that was the same year that John Shuman graduated from Georgia Southern with a degree in business.
“Our dad said, ‘Look, it’s all over. We’re liquidating. We’re selling out, we’re shutting down,’” Shuman says.
While his two brothers and sister each moved on from farming at that time, John Shuman could not fathom doing anything else.
“I said, ‘Dad, this is all I ever wanted to do. On Saturdays and weekends and summers, this is all we saw you do and all we did together. I want to be in the Vidalia onion business,’” John says. “He said, ‘Well I don’t have any money to help you there.’”
Fresh out of college, John was stuck. Removed from growing his own Vidalia sweet onions, he petitioned area farmers to grow on their behalf. “I had a couple of onion growers who said, ‘If you can sell them, we’ll pack them.’ That was the fall of 1994. The spring of ’95 was my first onion crop,” Shuman says.
Still, Shuman was making little money. And with no collateral, he could not secure a $15,000 loan to relaunch the business.
“My Dad said, ‘Look, I can’t help you. But I’ll tell you what: You can probably walk across the street and talk to your grandmother and see if she’d co-sign the note with you,’” Shuman says. “I did, and that’s what she did, and that’s how I got started.”
Shuman Farms was reborn. Today it partners with several growers to bring more than 2,800 acres of Vidalia onions to market.
“It was tough in those early years. I had a desk, a telephone, and a fax machine,” Shuman says. “I wasn’t sure it was going to work out. I started taking real estate classes at night that first year. That was Plan B. I needed a parachute in case it didn’t work out. But it did work out. This is all I ever wanted to do. I had to find a way to make it work.”
In the process, Shuman has “worn many, many hats,” he says, as has his brother Mark, who joined the business 10 years in.
“We are growers. We are farmers. That is one of the things that we do,” he says. “But in order to be in the business that we’re in — a fully integrated seed-to-shelf business — you have to be proficient and very good at not only farming, and agronomics, and growing a crop, and bringing it to market, but you have to be proficient at sales and marketing, and distribution, and managing a company.”
Grilling a good burger helps, too. Topped with Vidalia onions, of course, and perhaps prepared — like everything else that comes out of Shuman Farms — well done.
At a Glance: Shuman Farms
President/CEO: John Shuman
Founded: late 1970s (re-established mid-1990s)
Headquarters: Reidsville, GA
Crop: sweet onions
Size: 5,000-plus acres (Shuman Farms and affiliate farms)
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