An Exercise from Flower Farming for Profit: Yield and Waste with Lennie Larkin!
Lennie Larkin (of B-Side Farms) has been an (online) flower friend for many years now, and is one of the best and most effective flower farmers that I know.
Lennie has a book coming out - Flower Farming for Profit - and she has been also hosting some IG lives on different flower farming topics (which are super helpful and insightful for everyone including newbies and experienced/veteran flower growers).
In one of the more recent IG lives, Lennie talks about tracking yield and waste.
YIELD is defined as the amount of good quality (salable) flowers that you can obtain from a plant/planting/row/farm, while WASTE is defined as the number of good quality (salable) flowers that are not harvested/sold.
And why is yield and waste important? It’s because they are some of the two most important numbers to know when trying to calculate really anything - profitability, crop planning, crop selection, future developments, a lot of things.
And it’s also important because it gets down to the number that actually matters - NET profit.
It doesn’t matter how much your gross sales are if your production costs, people costs, transportation and supplies and utilities eat up 90% of those sales. Would you grow and sell $100,000 worth of flowers if after everything is paid for in terms of inputs and overhead you only net $20,000? And what if you grew and sold $50,000 but were efficient enough to where you still could net $20,000?
It’s one of the ways in which we have been able to downsize our farm, but still have not only maintained profits - but increased the profitability of our farm, because we know exactly what makes us profitable and what works well for our operation.
I’m going to discuss with you how we track both yield and waste - it may not be the way that you track it, but hopefully it at least gives you some ideas!
How we track yield
We cut down on steps (simple and concise is best with tracking) and just track what it is that we sell. Harvest numbers don’t matter if you don’t actually move your product, so we just track the final number via the products sold.
Each product has a unique ID or nickname with a corresponding number of materials in its “ingredients”. And if the ingredients change, it gets a new ID or nickname to keep it separate from another product.
For example, in spring we have a simple mixed bouquet that also can be a bridesmaid bouquet or a centerpiece (depending on the needs of the client or customer) that is nicknamed “Spring Buttercream” because of its colors and seasonality (this makes most sense to me, you may have something different in mind when naming yours and it truly doesn’t matter as long as you name it something memorable that you can track with ).
The recipe for Spring Buttercream is:
6 stems Calendula ‘Ivory Princess’
3 stems perennial sweet pea (lathyrus latifolius - a great foliage plant here)
6 stems Austrian winter pea vine
5 stems orlaya
3 stems bachelor button ‘White Ball’
Therefore, you can just track the number of Spring Buttercreams to figure out the total number of stems sold in all these throughout the season
APRIL: 12
MAY: 24
JUNE: 24
For a total of 60 Spring Buttercreams sold, which means that totals to
360 stems Calendula ‘Ivory Princess’
180 stems perennial sweet pea (lathyrus latifolius - a great foliage plant here)
360 stems Austrian winter pea vine
300 stems orlaya
180 stems bachelor button ‘White Ball’
Tidy and great accountability! You just have to make sure that you stick with your floral “recipes” and it makes things very easy to track.
(Side note, it also makes planting and crop planning very easy as well - you can estimate the number of the product you want to sell during the season and then backtrack to how many flowers you need. It’s difficult to visualize necessarily just how much you need, so this helps you to get an idea of the bigger picture - we need to plant a lot of the larger volume blooms).
Let’s say that you have an off-week where you substitute in white sweet peas for the bachelor buttons (Spring Buttercream 2) or daucus for the orlaya (Spring Buttercream 3) - it doesn’t matter, because you just create its own identity as an independent and different product which allows you to track everything.
How We Track Waste
Waste is a little bit more tricky, because it’s not quite as intentional or easy to track as the product that is sold.
In Lennie’s live, she recommends counting the uncut flowers in the field to keep track of waste. If you’re doing it or an employee is doing it, it’s part of the process when you’re harvesting.
This is of course the ideal model, but if you’re a part-time flower farmer like I am (or you’re really bad with keeping up with harvesting) then it might be a bit more difficult to keep up with tracking in that respect.
While I can’t profess to have the best tracking for estimating waste, I do have a system in place that works in a set of tiers and take note of:
TIER 1: Any crops that remain 75% or more unharvested/unused/ungrown
TIER 2: Any crops that remain 50% or more unharvested/unused/ungrown
TIER 3: Any crops that remain 30% or more unharvested/unused/ungrown
For example, we found that over the years our single stem sunflowers started off at tier 3, then tier 2, then tier 1 - not necessarily due to a lack of productivity or cultivation issues, but simply because our design styles changed and sunflowers no longer fit into our recipes. They were therefore eliminated from the crop plans as a result (which is funny because we kept growing them in larger quantities because I felt some sort of compulsion to grow them that I have still no idea why we did so).
Another example would be the snapdragons we grew. Beautiful, tall Rocket and Potomac snaps in the most gorgeous colors that should have been a complete shoo-in but ended up having a massive infestation of cabbage loopers that caused every single stem to be completely unusable, so they got tossed and unfortunately ended up in tier 1 as a result.
We also keep an eye out for a few other red flags when it comes to designing and selling products
If there’s a variety that continually wilts or flops or shatters and has to be removed consistently from arrangements (immature vitex blooms, hollyhocks, dark basil that hasn’t been treated with Quickdip)
If there is a variety that is extremely low in production, is inconsistent in color and form, or has notable defects in performance or appearance (salpiglossis, zinnia ‘Envy’, schizanthus)
If there is a variety that performs well - but doesn’t sell or is objected to by the client (yellow sunflowers, orange marigolds, red zinnias)
If there is a variety that produces so well that we consistently have leftovers in the harvest buckets after completing designs (‘Persian carpet’ zinnias, Frosted Explosion grass, apple mint, Indian grass)
And while this doesn’t nail every single stem, it’s good enough to where we can track our production and usage and sales very well. We can also use this to our advantage to fix some issues
Continually wilts, flops, shatters = better conditioning, use of Quickdip, change harvesting window
Low in production = plant more if it’s a good material that is worth the extra production
Inconsistent in color/form/poor performance/appearance = check cultivation info, trial in smaller amounts to see if you can overcome the inconsistency
Performs well but doesn’t sell = try mixing with other varieties to see if it can work in a mix of other flowers
Consistent leftovers = reduce the amount of plants/area of production for these arieties
These are all levers that you can push and pull in order to fine tune your flower farm to be as efficient as possible.
Want to decrease your waste? Pull back on the stuff that’s not selling, you’re overproducing, or that’s not performing well for you.
Want to increase your yield? Focus on the flowers that you consistently reach for, that perform well for you and give you consistent sales as well.
And these analyses may surprise you! We found that in summer we actually only are utilizing about six ingredients in the majority of our bouquet recipes - large zinnias, smaller dahlias, small zinnias, basil, mint and scabiosa - so we focused on just growing these for the majority of our materials.
And while we wanted to keep things seasonal, we grew a VERY small patch of miscellaneous materials to keep things seasonal and add textural and color and visual interest. Stuff that you only need a few stems of to make things feel different - the glamorous “accessories” of the bouquet like strawflowers, phlox, feathertop grass, small marigolds, currant tomato fruits, love in a puff vine and little bits and pieces. You don’t need much, and they are not essential to your crop planning but are fun to have around and keep you creatively stimulated BUT are in such a small scale that they don’t take away time, effort or space away from the workhorses.
If you’re finding that this sort of information is relevant, interesting and helpful for you, head on over to Lennie’s page to read more about her book, read her tips on her blog or even watch her webinars and IG lives on running a profitable flower farm.
If you’re interested in learning more about small scale flower farming, these blog posts will be very pertinent to you!