Pricing & Profitability for Today's Flower Farmer
Pointers from a Diversity of Pros
4 QUESTIONS
- Which flower crop earns you the most, and how do you know?
- Which flower do you love that does not make money?
- Do you track the cost of goods sold to see which crops pay best, or do you rely more on experience than on detailed records?
- What advice would you give new growers deciding what to plant and what will bring in income?
NOTE
There's no magic formula. Our panel of flower farmers discusses how to personalize your approach to recordkeeping and crop tracking to establish fair pricing, enhance profitability, and adapt to an everchanging landscape.
The pandemic years showed that resilience and flexibility hold a farm together. Many growers had already bought seed and bulbs before COVID arrived. The flowers bloomed regardless, and few farmers could hit pause; most pushed ahead despite the uncertainty.
Growers found creative ways through. One added surplus lisianthus to grocery bouquets instead of composting it. Event florists switched to selling and delivering Mother's Day arrangements when weddings were canceled. Finding new outlets for flowers matters more than ever, and floral businesses have shown remarkable resourcefulness.
Knowing what it really costs to grow the flowers you sell is one of the best ways to reduce uncertainty. To explore that, we spoke with a longtime grower, co-owner of a Skagit Valley flower farm in Washington and a co-founder of a regional wholesale growers' cooperative. We asked her: How do you decide to drop crops that do not pay, and how do you know which ones pay best? She laughed and admitted that it is hard to be rational when your business is beauty.
In her experience, as farms mature, growers eventually reach a point where they are tired enough to accept that staying in business means getting serious about making a living.
Her farm moved from growing hundreds of cut-flower varieties to focusing on a smaller set of high-value perennials, such as hellebores, and woody plants such as lilac.
Local designers buy every spring hellebore the farm can supply, but a narrow crop list carries risk. Two years in a row brought unusually late frosts. Hellebores tolerate frost, but plants already in full flower were hit by a hard freeze, and only a fraction recovered. It showed how quickly an entire crop can be lost, even a perennial one, and the farm spent months settling a crop insurance claim.
That is why a diverse crop mix works as a kind of insurance. Other growers point out that farming several sites with different microclimates can also protect crops from extreme weather.
Because flower farming is so uncertain, the Hensley's team asked a range of growers about their pricing and business practices and how they turn a productive field into a profitable one. Along with the Washington grower (Zones 7b–8b), we surveyed four flower farmers with different levels of experience in different climates.
- A grower at an Arizona high-desert flower farm raises cut flowers in a small town in southern Arizona near the Mexican border (Zones 7b–8b).
- A farmer-florist at a Montana flower farm in the Gallatin Valley (Zones 4a–5a), also teaches floral design.
- A farmer-florist at a southeastern Pennsylvania flower farm (Zones 6b–7a), also runs a retail flower and plant shop.
- A veteran market grower at a Virginia urban flower farm in the Hampton Roads area (Zones 7b–8a), is also an author and teaches online courses for growers and florists.
1 • What is your most profitable flower crop (and how do you you know this)?
Montana grower: Sweet peas were the grower's top earner one recent season, the first year she started them in midwinter instead of mid-spring, and the early start paid off. A few dozen double plants in several colors produced multiple bunches of each variety every week. The crop was low-maintenance, with easy germination, one round of pinching and regular high-nitrogen feeding until bloom.
Pennsylvania grower: Probably lisianthus. The farm grows thousands of plants a year, sells every stem and could sell more. Plugs are fairly affordable, and the crop does well in her variable climate. She adds more each year and tries to plant earlier and harvest later, because lisianthus is a superb, long-lasting stem for bouquets and arrangements and bridges the gap between May peonies and August dahlias. She aims to have it from June through September.
Virginia grower: Annual flowers need the least investment for the highest return, which makes them ideal for learning to farm, finding customers, learning to sell and building a solid business. When the inevitable setbacks come, losses with annuals are small, while the upside can be large. Nearly all of her farm's production over two decades has been annual flowers , which she considers the best value for the money.
Some profits are hidden. Bookkeeping software can produce useful sales reports, but a crop's true value does not always show on paper. Take filler crops for weekly mixed bouquets: hunting for enough filler, worrying about bouquet size and ending up using pricier focal flowers when filler runs short all waste labor and eat into profit. Fillers may not look impressive on a sales report, but they are essential to an efficient, profitable bouquet business. Years of supplying large weekly bouquet orders to supermarkets and many florists gave her deep respect for these supporting flowers.
Read more about Growers' Favorite Foliage & Filler Crops…
Arizona grower: Sunflowers are among her most profitable crops. Customers love them, and she can sell them in straight bunches, in mixed bunches or dried. Sunflowers make up a large share of her business this season, and she plans to plant more, so that share will likely grow.
Washington grower: Through the cooperative, her farm has learned that profitability depends on how and to whom you sell. At a farmers market, which is essentially retail, a mixed bouquetcan carry a healthy markup. Selling wholesale to florists and shops is different: crops that give one stem per seed are hard to make money on because of the labor. Streamlining farm work can cut costs, and she favors cut-and-come-again annuals as more profitable, such as Icelandic poppies and amaranth. She is also enthusiastic about rudbeckias because each plant gives several stems and the cut flowers keep for a couple of weeks or more in the cooler, which adds selling flexibility.
2 • What is an example of a flower you love, but that isn't a good moneymaker?
Pennsylvania grower: Because she plans to farm for many years, she balances income against enjoyment. She avoids growing crops she does not like and instead buys them from other local farms, supporting growers who enjoy crops she does not (sunflowers, for instance). She focuses her time on flowers that both earn well and that she loves, such as dahlias and peonies. Farming is hard enough without growing a flower you dislike just for bouquets, so she would rather buy it and spend more time with her dahlias.
Garden roses are her favorite money-losing flower. In southeastern Pennsylvania they struggle with disease and bloom slowly, and they do not break even, but she adores them and will keep growing them for the joy they bring.
Virginia grower: As a gardener, she loves sweet peas. As a commercial grower, she gives them very little field space. To get stems long enough for commercial buyers, whole multi-stem vines must be cut, the trellising takes a lot of labor, and on a small urban farm there is not enough time for the plants to regrow productively. She keeps a short row for her own enjoyment, but they bloom too briefly to be profitable.
Arizona grower: Roses do not earn back the space they take on her very small farm. She keeps them because she loves their look and scent, but with so little room she might not invest in them again.
One annual she has stopped growing despite loving it: cosmos. Nothing matches its airy look floating above a bouquet, but even when cut early, its vase life disappoints her. In mixed bouquets, cosmos fade first while everything else still looks fresh.
Montana grower: Sunflowers. She loves them, but wedding clients rarely want them. The farm also dropped Benary's Giant Salmon Zinnias a few years ago, though she plans to bring them back because most local growers have stopped growing them.
3 • Do you track "cost of goods sold" so you can determine which crops are better moneymakers? Are you relying more on experience or on detailed recordkeeping?
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Virginia grower: Beyond tracking straight and mixed bunch sales to commercial accounts through invoicing software, her decisions are based on observation. A theme in her teaching, including her online flower-farming course on basics, annuals and marketing, is paying attention to every part of the business that affects profit. Smart growers keep asking how a task could be done more efficiently, because efficiency means savings and more profit.
Arizona grower: Until recently she ran her business on experience alone. When she set out to grow the business, she knew she needed exact numbers on money coming in and going out, so she began working with a flower-farm business coach at a Midwest flower farm and an online farmer-florist programwho built spreadsheets that break down the cost of each crop, including labor. Now she can clearly see which crops earn the most. She has also learned that she cannot simply charge what another farm charges for a dahlia without knowing how their costs differ. If she brings in compost and hires help with a tractor to spread and till it while another farm uses no-till and leaves tubers in the ground, their production costs, and cost per stem, will be completely different.
Washington grower: The turning point for her farm was reading a well-known business handbook for organic farmers. It was written for vegetable growers, but the principles apply easily to flowers. The core idea is to do careful cost studies. You will quickly find that labor is your biggest expense, and once you count your own labor, you may find crops you are losing money on. Instinct may say a crop is profitable while the math says otherwise; one year she found she had spent money to bring a crop of stock to market. That is the last thing an exhausted farmer wants.
Read more about Keeping Records During the Busy Season…
Montana grower: She mostly works from experience. She kept records early on, but since the farm focuses on weddings, she now knows which crops she needs and which are worth growing versus buying from other farms. Her best earners are sweet pea, ranunculus, scabiosa, delphinium, dahlia, and yarrow. With a hoop house, she believes scented geranium and celosia would join that list.
Pennsylvania grower: After several seasons, she has a good sense of what each crop costs, so she can judge a harvest and decide whether to keep growing it. She factors in weeding hours and drops varieties that neither bring joy nor pay the bills. She loves charts and data but rarely has time to crunch numbers, so most of it lives in her head.
4 • What advice do you have for beginning farmers who need to start making smart decisions about what to grow and what will produce income for their farm?
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Read 5 Cool Flowers You Can Plant Now (or Very Early Next Spring)…
Arizona grower: Research first and treat your first year as a practice year to see what grows well. Do not wait until spring; look into a good book on cool-season flowers to learn about early spring annuals. Join flower-farming communities online, since connection matters, and search those groups when you have questions, because someone has likely faced the same issue. Keep good notes for next year. Track revenue, profit margin, cost of goods sold, operating expenses and labor from the very start, whether you are a hobbyist or planning a business, and use a program that gives you the tools if you need them. Doing this from the beginning saves a lot of stress later.
Washington grower: The co-op's approach is simple: if a crop cannot be grown for a given price, raise the price. That is another route to profit; you do not have to stop growing a crop. You can charge more for it, particularly when demand is strong.
Montana grower: First decide where you will sell: weddings, subscriptions, farmers markets, florists or wholesale. Each needs different crops. Rather than ordering every seed you see, think ahead and confirm there is demand, based on your customers' tastes as well as your own. If you grow for weddings and florists, see what other local growers produce and complement it rather than compete; when everyone grows something different, everyone benefits. She looks for unusual, textural crops, knowing she can buy lush focal flowers from other farms.
Pennsylvania grower: Set a goal for where you want your farm to be in five to ten years, and be willing to adjust it as you gain experience and conditions change.
Likewise, do not lock into one way of doing things. Keep looking for improvements. Her farm has changed its operations many times. It is easy to compare yourself with others and feel inadequate, but run your farm according to your own goals.
Trial new plants and drop the ones that do not work; she has abandoned plenty along the way. If you still want to enjoy them, grow them in a home garden rather than your production field. If you lack a business or marketing background, take a course. Growing and selling both need attention, and there is no business without a place to sell your stems.
Virginia grower: Start small with low investment and learn how to build a profitable flower business before spending big. Avoid being seduced by beautiful, expensive crops until you have customers and some experience. Those flowers will still be there when your business is ready to grow and sell them successfully.
Factor in the Knowns, then Fill in the Gaps
The clear lesson from these growers is that you need some form of record-keeping to know whether your crops make money. After unpredictable seasons, it is a good time to review each crop and run the numbers. Plan how you will track expenses going forward, and include the labor you do not pay for: your own.
You cannot future-proof a flower farm, but turning even a modest profit each year helps it weather the ups and downs ahead. Profit is not the only goal; resilience and adaptability come from staying open to new ways of turning challenges into opportunities. The Washington grower admits that growers, like all flower lovers, have weaknesses: new varieties and trendy colors are fun to grow and customers respond to them, while a streamlined crop list can feel dull. So she looks for gaps in the market she can fill with something new.
