Why We Decided to Downsize Our Flower Farm

Dear reader, I wanted to let you know that we downsized our flower farm.

We used to grow on nearly half an acre of cut flowers - perennials, woodies, annuals, bulbs, dahlias galore, the whole thing (which doesn’t sound like a lot, but can still be quite a lot of work).

But we’ve currently shrunk our growing space to around a quarter of an acre - and have never been happier or more profitable.

You might be asking yourself “Why would you downsize your growing space?”

After all, every year I started asking myself what we could do to scale up the business and grow more flowers the following year.

That’s the American dream, right?

We’re supposed to want bigger, better, faster right?

In many cases, that might be true. But not for our case.

My circumstances are unusual - I’m not doing this to replace my job (I am very happy, fulfilled and passionate about my job) and I’m also not doing this purely as a form of escapism, so I didn’t necessarily want things to be excessively busy or bigger.

My desire and mission for our little business when we started was to bring beauty and joy to the people around me in the form of flowers (and bring joy to myself as well). But we had reached a point in which none of those things was happening - the growing and business was a strain, a palpable weight on the mind - and I realized that we needed a change.

We talked about it long and hard, and one day we made the decision to implement that change.

We switched our business model, our focus, even what we would grow - and decided to downsize the square footage that we were growing on, down to less than 1/4 of an acre.

It was hard - one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made, not only because I knew that it would make things challenging, but it felt that in a way, we were almost giving up. Giving up on the business, giving up on this life and this world we had created.

But good news - I’ve never been happier, and we’ve never enjoyed growing flowers more than we do now - but I wanted to give you some perspective on some of the reasons why we decided to downsize.

Water and precipitation

Here in New Mexico, we are always in a drought. Doesn’t matter how much rain or snow we get, we have and will always be in a drought.

Water is probably the most limiting resource for us, and is also the most expensive. Everything you plant requires a source of water (with possibly the exception of cacti) so they have to be on drip irrigation or a sprinkler or needs to be hand watered.

And after a while, the irrigation costs became too much. We were actually losing money because we were trying to keep up with irrigating huge rows of flowers due to the cost of water.

There’s also the guilt that came with watering on that large of a scale. Were we using water that could be better sent elsewhere? Was this unsustainable in the long term?

Because of this, we decided to downsize the space we were actively irrigating and growing on. We did end up planting native grasses and forbs in the former flower beds (such as Salvia azurea and Eragrostis trichodes) but focused our growing in a few smaller beds that we could be more effective and efficient when irrigating.

Life Got Busy

Perhaps not necessarily more busy, but our priorities shifted. While before the lockdown/quarantine period we were always hustling and trying to expand the business, after that period we realized that we had our priorities out of balance - and we decided to change our focus.

It appears that we as a society are more busy and life is more chaotic than before, and as a result we have found our lives professionally and personally have gotten a bit more crowded.

Since flower farming wasn’t our full-time job, it always came second to the major responsibilities in our life. It got to a point during one summer that we had to ask ourselves “What are we even doing this for?”

As a result, we made the decision to scale back as well because it was all just too much. Too much work, too much stress, and we weren’t even being effective, successful or productive.

Mother Nature Has Become More Unpredictable

Just over the past decade, the weather has become even more unpredictable. Our springs have started swinging from later freezes and frosts to searing hot 85 F + days that are occurring earlier and earlier. Our summers have gotten hotter and drier, culminating this past year with a full month of temperatures above 100 F, and our winters have gotten more drastic, swinging between 60 F days and dropping down into the teens.

Our precipitation has become even less reliable, with shorter and shorter monsoon seasons and the patterns of rain becoming more and more unpredictable, and water shortages becoming more frequent.

In some ways it just seems that the entire world has become less predictable. Which is fair - our alleged control and understanding of nature is a simple illusion that we’ve created for ourselves - but we’re starting to feel it on a level that is really making us less sure of future plans.

We STopped Doing Large Scale WEddings

Large scale weddings were one of the main reasons why we started growing so many flowers. To be able to fulfill the flowers needed, we had to ensure that not only did we have enough flowers for the event but also that we had backup flowers just in case we needed more.

In the beginning we wanted bigger weddings. Because bigger weddings meant bigger payouts, and they also would bring more large weddings and events.

But as we started completing those big weddings, it started becoming apparent that this wasn’t always the case. And in our case at least, the bigger weddings created bigger headaches and bigger stresses for us.

One Saturday, as we were picking up a wedding at midnight and driving home in the rental van, we had a long and hard discussion - was this what we wanted? To be taking care of someone else’s event, to be working while other people were spending time and enjoying an event with their friends and family? What were we doing here?

That’s where we made the decision to no longer take on large weddings. We did keep a few smaller, simpler weddings - elopments or small family weddings (which are always better and much more pleasant for everyone involved including the bride and groom) and found that they continued to refer family, friends and acquaintances to us that would also fit the same small, simple wedding model.

And most importantly with those small, simple weddings we ended up needing fewer flowers and a smaller volume of floral material - perfect for our setup and circumstances.

We Stopped Trying to Grow Everything

I used to start dreaming and planning the next big project for us. Every year had a large and new introduction - the Hamari Gold dahlia, the year we decided to go whole-hog on pineapple lilies, the installation of garden roses - and the projects kept on coming.

Until one year I realized that despite all of these projects, nothing had really changed. And in fact, it became more complicated, because we were growing so many different varieties of flowers and plants that made care of those different varieties difficult.

That’s when we started eliminating a lot of the things we were trying to grow or thinking of starting. And even the most tempting dahlias or shiny new varieties were met with a high amount of skepticism - would it truly change things? Would we miss them if we didn’t grow them? Just how different can each ball-type dahlia be from one another when everything was said and done?

And that’s when I started realizing as well that just because you’re growing the latest and greatest flower doesn’t mean that it makes your designs any appreciably better. It doesn’t attract more customers, book more weddings, or attract different people to you.

And when you’ve grown for years, you start to have less tolerance for fussy, finicky, unpredictable plants. The plants that just don’t end up doing well for you get frustrating to the point where you never grow them again. And the plants that do thrive and succeed for you will get your attention.

Far more importantly, I’ve learned that it also doesn’t matter so much what you grow as how you use it. I remember floral designer Cynthia Fan utilized violas and a tower of dog hair to create one of the most stunning and intriguing designs I had seen in years. Even non-traditional floral materials - stalks of lacinato kale, the dead stems of bindweed, clusters of tomatoes, the flowering blooms of a mustard cover crop - can be beautiful in the right hands.

When you understand floral design, the limitations you previously thought were present as a grower suddenly become less problematic. And when you can get creative, some of the most incredible creations and work can come from adversity.

We Wanted to Become More Efficient

In any business, there is waste. Some businesses it is more, some less.

Flower farming is no exception - you’ll have crop failures, unsold materials and things that just don’t work out.

But when it came down to it, we found that we were growing entire crops that we weren’t utilizing in any form or fashion (to the point I’m not even sure why we were growing them if I’m going to be perfectly honest). And that waste just didn’t make sense to me that even as a small scale flower farm we were still having unsold flowers.

We took a long and hard look at what was selling, what we needed and tried to minimize the waste. And then the next year we had records and checked again, and continued to do so until we started to really get down to the bare bones of what we needed to grow.

Turns out we didn’t need to grow a lot of things. Snapdragons? Good producer but never really used them. Cosmos were prolific but it was only the more unique and small-scale varieties that were useful in arrangements. I liked the more autumnal colored sunflowers, but with rudbeckia providing similar coloration and form, they were unfortunately quite redundant and the amount of effort it took to time the sowing of sunflowers was just another hassle.

It takes a lot of work and being honest with yourself. You may even have to ask yourself “Am I growing this for my business, or am I growing it for my own enjoyment?” But I promise, the work is totally worth it.

And if you are truly growing flowers that are useful and a joy to work and design with, it makes life so much easier. You’re not trying something on a whim, or the chance that it might change things with your business or customers - you’re growing what makes business sense.

We Wanted To Simplify Things

If you’ve read my book The Simplified Flower Farm, it’s a book about being more efficient and simplifying your flower farming practices. And not going to lie, that book was written at a point where I was super frustrated and agonizing over the way that our farm was running (don’t worry, it’s filled completely with useful and actionable tips, but it was also a partial longing for a simpler approach that I didn’t know how to articulate exactly).

But I’ll be honest in that almost ten years into doing this, the starting of different flower species and cultivars gets old. If you’ve grown twelve different types of snapdragons, do you really need to continue to trial and grow more? I’m also getting dahlia fatigue as well, because no matter how floriferous and how gorgeous a new variety of dahlia is, how much better can it be compared to the ones that I’m already growing?

There’s also the fact that I’ve learned over the years that growing a wider variety of flowers creates more complexity and confusion. If you’re juggling fifty flower cultivars, some of which may perennials, some of which may require drastically different propagation or growing conditions compared to the next, you’re going to also have more failures due to a sheer lack of time and mental capacity to balance everything.

There’s seemingly a large pressure to grow more, have more, do more, on a bigger scale - and I just don’t think that mindset is sustainable nor the correct one with flower farming. Sure, growing fewer varieties may seem a bit more boring, but it really allows you to hone in on growing those few varieties very well.

Take for example, we started only growing a few varieties of zinnias as opposed to the twelve varieties that we grew our first year. Many of those varieties of zinnias were fun and pretty in their own right, but just didn’t get used by us in our work, so they were eliminated.

It’s now to the point where I selected for a pale pastel mix for our smaller zinnias (the Kokoro Garden Mix) so I only had to grow one variety of zinnia (although I think we’ll be adding a pastel-colored variety that has a larger bloom size in the future) which makes for an even more efficient growing experience.

I’m also experimenting with just how few flower varieties we can actually grow (while still being able to have enough variety and versatility to be able to do what we need to do with them). In essence, I’d love to be able to focus on growing just a few varieties of flowers that would serve all our needs - but more on that in a future post.

We Wanted to Focus

Contrary to popular misconceptions among my family and friends, I actually prefer being able to focus on just a few things at a time and do them well.

When I have too many things on my plate, I get overwhelmed (executive dysfunction hits me pretty hard) and not only do I not do well with whatever I’m trying to do, it really starts putting me in a bad place mentally and emotionally because of the stress.

When we started eliminating the dozens of different projects I was juggling with the farm, I felt immense relief. Not only did I not have to deal with some of the projects that weren’t going well or just didn’t work out for me, it allowed me to put more energy and creativity towards the projects that I wanted to do and that would be more effective in the long term.

Now for example that we’re focusing more on things like breeding zinnias and doing small scale design, I’ve never been happier and we’ve never been more profitable and productive, which in turn allows us to continue to do what it is that we’re doing now.

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I hope that you found this helpful.

I hope you perhaps even found this inspirational.

And mostly I hope that you perhaps have taken away the fact that you’re not alone in this, and there are likely plenty of other flower farmers who are in the same situation and same thoughts and mindset as you and I.

My hope and ultimate goal for you is to be able to take your business to where it can help you achieve your goals and dreams - no matter the size or scale of your business.

And if that means downsizing your farm or operation, I want you to not be afraid to do so. There’s a lot of benefits that can come from it on both a professional and personal level.