It sounds like he created a co-operative. This is the case in Oregon where lots of milk growers...er...dairy farmers pool their resources into a funnel organization, Tillamook Farmer's Co-op, that handles packaging, distribution and marketing. This is such a wild story tho, I loved reading it.
Not really a co-op. Unless I misunderstood something, he contacted a single farm and is basically acting as their digital marketing side. They got so good at this that the other farms in the area decided to stop competing on this front(DTC online sales) and focus on other segments of their business. That's what I assumed he meant when he said "other farms started sending people our way".
There are very few co-ops in the South as compared to other parts of the world. There is a lot more direct-to-mass production/buyers farms here as well as a lot of "factory" farming.
That being said what he's doing is something that is hard to reproduce simply because Vidalia onions cannot be grown except in a certain geographic area. You can take the same onion and grow it elsewhere, it will taste exactly or very close to the same, you just cannot sell it as a Vidalia. I'm surprised that there aren't more of the boutique style shops for things like Vidalia onions, Georgia peaches, etc.
Source: born, raised, lived whole life in Ga within a farming family.
It's weird that this was done with special legislation. I see that the US does not have any general mechanism for such situations, although it has done this for these onions and for Tennessee whiskey specifically.
The EU has a system-wide concept of products (mostly but not exclusively foods) that are by definition produced in a set region, by a particular method etcetera called the Protected Designation of Origin. This is inspired by laws in some of its member states (most famously France's AOC laws which protect Champagne) but because it's a system rather than being stapled into the law for one specific product it makes it practical to use for less famous things where the heavy lifting of actual legislation would be too much to ask. If your town produces a peculiar furry hat, and then one day sales of the furry hats begin to drop off because it turns out somebody is making replicas in China and selling them under your town's name, applying for PDO is a relatively straight forwad way to fix that across the entire EU without trying to attract attention from legislators in two dozen countries.
Of course PDOs can be abused (e.g. arguably protection of Newcastle Brown Ale was pointless, its only producers were indeed in Newcastle, but when they decided to move they simply applied to discontinue the PDO status...) but overall it seems like having a framework makes more sense than only doing this as actual national legislation (a rule saying Vidalia onions are from Georgia only works because the US government enforces it, the part in Georgia state law has very little effect)
The effort was initially at the state (Georgia) level in 1986. Then the producers pushed to have the Department of Agriculture make the area the official designation at the federal level. This was done later in 1989.
The US doesn't have a lot of "protected region" products. Obviously things with a state name or place have to be from that place, but we don't really do that as much here as Europe. Just not the American way I guess.
It's why you can buy "Swiss Cheese" from Wisconsin and Bourbon Whiskey from Orlando.
That's fair. The US has a history of special interest groups petitioning the government for regulations that would benefit them. I suppose this happens in the EU too but it's all over the place here.
I didn't grow up in one of the counties that are considered under the bounds of the Vidalia area (although pretty close) but we grew the same onions. They tasted, smelled, and looked exactly the same. Were I to try to sell them as Vidalias I could have been sued, but we were growing them for personal consumption anyway.
For people like me with a family diaspora and australian quarantine, they also sell very cool teeshirts. I loved watching giant bricks of cheese come out of the cheese-a-mathon.
