Greg Yielding spent more than a dozen years in the world of rice. Now, after coming to the Eaton, Colorado-based National Onion Association as executive vice president in 2019, he is becoming familiar with the world of onions. The NOA headquarters moved just down the road from its longtime Greeley home to Eaton in 2020.
Before coming to Colorado, Yielding had been living in Jackson, Mo., where he had been serving simultaneously as the director of emerging markets and special projects for the U.S. Rice Producers Association, as the executive director of the Missouri Rice Research and Merchandising Council, and as the executive director for the Arkansas Rice Growers Association.
Yielding said there are six major rice producing states, including Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Texas, Louisiana and California.
He now lobbies on behalf of the much more widespread U.S. onion industry on issues such as agricultural transportation, trade and labor issues.
COVID-19 effect
As of early May, Yielding said it was too early to say if U.S. onion acreage this year would be much changed from a year ago.
But COVID-19 did dramatically affect growers last year, and the NOA was involved in lobbying for the Farmers to Families Food Box Program and direct coronavirus assistance payments to onion growers.
“We worked really hard to make that a reality,” he said, referring both to the inclusion of onions in the food box program and the direct payments to onion growers.
The USDA needed direction in helping to determine how onion growers were affected by the pandemic, relative to lost sales and other measures.
“We were instrumental in putting something together, not just writing a letter and saying, ‘Include us in the program, we need your help,” but saying ‘Here is how to do it.’”
While the industry did not get everything it asked for, being included in the program was critical, he said.
Onion growers received just more than $20 million in the USDA’s Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (CFAP 1), according to the agency.
Live and in-person
Though COVID-19 canceled industry events starting in March 2020, Yielding said the onion industry is on track for more in-person meetings in the months ahead.
This year, Yielding said the NOA will have a meeting in Nashville in July; the group’s annual meeting is set for Puerto Rico in early December. Because Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, travel is not expected to be a problem, he said.
“That (will be) the first time we’ve ever been (in Puerto Rico) for a show, and we are looking forward to that,” he said.
