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Well-marketed cut flowers can net existing farms an increase in income per acre compared to traditional vegetables, according to Robin Trott, a seasoned Extension educator at the University of Minnesota and owner of cut Prairie Garden Farm, a cut flower operation in Starbuck, Minnesota with 15 years of successful production.
Trott was the main presenter on Feb. 14 for the first in a series of webinars held by the University of Minnesota Extension, providing practical guidance for cut flower farming in Minnesota. Subsequent webinars, aimed at giving the knowledge and skills necessary to thrive in the cut flower market, are scheduled for March.
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It was fitting for the series to start on Valentine’s Day, which Trott said is the biggest flower holiday of the year, followed closely by Mother’s Day. Prairie Garden Farm had no flowers for the holiday, and starts selling in May and goes through Halloween, if possible. The farm’s decision not to sell in the winter is because the cost of heating a greenhouse would be more than what they could make back in flower sales.
“When you’re thinking about what your markets are going to be, that’s going to determine how much you’re going to need to grow,” Trott said. “Your customers don’t care what your costs are and they only care what their costs are, so you have to price (flowers) so they sell at the maximum price that people are willing to pay.”
Prairie Garden Farm predominately sells to florists but Trott said that most of the flower farms in Minnesota and Wisconsin don’t have that similar direct wholesale partnerships. Florists let them know when they think they’re being overcharged, but Trott said that USDA pricing includes cut flowers, and is accurate for what florists are paying their wholesalers currently.
A single farmer can adequately grow and sell an acre of flowers, said Trott, and according to UMN Extension data, an acre of flowers that is well-marketed can result in gross sales of $30,000 ($1.50 per cultivated square foot). The average price of a single stem is about 90 cents, she said, and less when selling to a wholesaler.
“If you want to grow $50,000 in sales, you’ll need two acres and two people, full- time,” she said. “And you need to sell 55,000 stems, which brings you down to about 11,000 a month in Minnesota during the growing season, or 2,600 stems per week, or 260 bunches if you’re doing them that way.”
“The floral industry, it’s dominated by FTD, Teleflora, 1-800-Flowers,” Trott said.
Customers of corporate flower arrangment companies are drawn to the ease and reliability, but Trott said even though the flowers often come like they looked online, the arrangements lack creativity and shipped flowers “lose face” as well as fragrance.
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“Most flowers are coming out of Central America, that are put into a box with no water, and during that transportation, they will lose a lot of their fragrance,” she said. “Local flowers are going to be way more fragrant.”
Maximum vase life is the “biggest selling point” for flowers, Trott said. For example, the Canterbury bells sold by Prairie Garden Farms are a hit with local florists because they can last around three weeks.
“I’m not saying every flower lasts that long, but that particular one does,” she said of Canterbury bells. “For flowers that really do have a fairly short vase life, local flowers will have the maximum vase life, and they haven’t lost their fragrance, and can be the best quality.”
Trott said that wholesale buyers like florists, restaurants and other stores are interested in organic flowers as long as it doesn’t cost them more. But flowers sold with an organic label can be misleading, she said.
“There is no organic floral preservative available to florist and floral designers, so they take that organic flower that you’ve grown, and they put it right into a floral preservative that isn’t organic,” she said. “That kills the organic quality of that flower.”
She said restaurants may be willing to pay a premium for organic flowers because they are not reselling them, and the same goes for grocery and big box stores, all of which Prairie Garden Farm has sold to in the past.
Growing solely organic flowers comes with a lot of restriction, Trott said, and not a lot of options for pest control. Since Prairie Garden Farm is not certified organic, she said they choose to say their flowers are grown “sustainably and responsibly.”
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“If we went with organic seed, we would be very limited in what we grow,” she said.
However, Trott said that getting certified organic can help farmers get into the CSA and subscription market.
“Consumers will value your organic certification more than a reseller will,” she said.
If going that route rather than selling to a wholesaler, restaurant or store, Trott said farmers need to get comfortable with putting bouquets together.
“If you’re doing a CSA, if you’re selling at a farmers market, if you’re doing the subscription, you’re going to be making bouquets,” she said, in which consistency is key. “”Especially if you’re doing a CSA, the same type of bouquet to everyone, so you need to have lots of similar flowers to do that with.”
“It requires that you plan to be able to harvest an appropriate mix of flowers for that bouquet,” she said. “When you do a container, you’re doing thrillers, fillers, and spillers.”
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How to be a flower farmer (and make money doing it) – Agweek
