The Flower Farming Movement Has a Problem
There’s an issue in the flower farming community that I don’t think is talked or discussed about enough.
It’s not just an issue in the flower farming community of course. It’s present in the farming community as a whole, and the entrepreneur and business world too.
The issue is that these days, a lot of flower farmers (or aspiring flower farmers) want to be big.
Well, not just big. Huge. Like, corporation size huge. Explosive growth year after year with a desire to capture the largest portion of the market as possible.
It might not seem like that way (and most flower farmers may not even recognize that they are doing it) but the actions of some flower farmers would say otherwise.
If you asked flower farmers as a whole in North America, it’s likely that the goal is to get as big as possible. Bigger fields, more tunnels, more sales, bigger gross sales, bigger profit and then bigger ambitions after that. And the year after that and the year after that.
We hear it all the time. Look how many dahlia tubers I’m growing, how many rows of lisianthus I’m growing, we’re putting up a hoophouse so that we can extend the season to increase the number of weeks we have flowers to sell, we’re doing winter workshops and forcing tulips to be bigger and have more product to sell, and the list just goes on and on and on.
In part, I blame society in general for this, because in (American) society, corporations that are publicly traded have a goal of increased value and returns for the shareholders. And year after year, you’re expected to grow and expand more and more and more for increased value and returns. It’s likely that we’ve internalized these values after being exposed to it, but we’ve come to the idea that bigger is better, larger scale is the goal and the dream is to be huge and massive.
In essence if you’re an entrepreneur (which you are as a flower farmer) then you should want to expand your business and scale up, right?
If twenty peony plants are great, then a hundred peony plants are even better. And if a hundred peonies are great, why not an entire acre of them? And why not just an acre, but an entire peony farm? And what if you were able to make your entire living off peonies?
(There is a flower farmer influencer that bragged about how she will make hundreds of thousands of gross income off her peony field, which is wildly misleading - that I’ll detail for you in a second).
Unfortunately the reality is that bigger is not always better. And even with a relatively low-maintenance plant like peonies, there is still work, issues, problems that can occur. Suddenly the issue of having enough product isn’t the problem - it’s moving that product that’s the issue. Being able to find a wholesale account that will give you a good price on your peonies, being able to hire and manage a team of people that will be able to harvest, clean, condition, store, and then to transport those peonies, and also being able to compete against the other people who have also planted peony fields and are looking to do the same thing as you (and there are likely hundreds if not thousands of people who have been buying peony roots and planting them the past four years or so, which will likely lead to a crash in the market soon enough when it comes to peonies from my estimates, but that’s a whole other issue).
With the giant scale of your peony operation, this leads to other issues including taking on roles of HR and management, marketing and sales, customer relations with your wholesale accounts, and suddenly you are indeed the CEO of your own business - but the honest truth is that after everything is said and done because of the increased inputs, increased costs of employees and the costs of doing business on a larger scale (not to mention the additional time and headache)suddenly you’re no longer growing flowers - but instead are managing a company.
Perhaps that might be exciting to a certain sect of the population, but for a lot of people who get into flower farming, the whole idea is to instead not obtain that end result (for me, part of the reason why I grow flowers is to get away from the corporate side of things that is my day job!)
I mean, it’s kind of ironic that some people have come so far to get away from their job to be their own boss, write their own agenda and do what they love - only to come back full circle in a sense.
What’s that saying? You quit your 9-5 to be your own boss, so now you get to work 24/7? And why is this a thing particularly with flower farmers?
Aside from what I’ve mentioned already, there is a sort of internalized value system that tells us that we are valued only so much as our contributions (to the family unit, the company, to the community, to society). And if we don’t make a large contribution, we are less valuable as a person.
I see it time and time again, with the idea that we have to make it “big” in order to have made it at all. This combined with a particularly American view that more is more and bigger is always better makes for quite a wicked combination of motivations to make us always feel inadequate and always needing to do more and produce more.
But what if it didn’t have to be this way?
Just because a company is bigger doesn’t necessarily mean that is better. A bigger house does not mean that is necessarily more comfortable, more beautiful or more of a home than a smaller one.
But if you are scrolling through social media feeds or chats or groups, it’s always more, more more. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to always be making an improvement to your business and farm, but it doesn’t always have to be one of larger scale. More ranunculus, more dahlias, more hydrangeas, more high tunnels, more plugs, more, more, more.
My advice to you is to take everything with a grain of salt. Just because someone else has doubled their ranunculus production does not mean you have to. You don’t know their business, their customers, their profitability, their situation, their growing conditions, nor if it’s even a good idea for them to grow more ranunculus. The only person’s circumstances that you know for sure is yourself of course, and unless another person is in an identical situation to yours (which happens rarely, if ever) you won’t necessarily know if the action taken by someone else will work for you.
Before you take on any big scaling of your flower farm, think about these things:
What does success truly look like to you? I’m not talking dollars, numbers or square feet/acreage. I’m talking about at the end of it all, what do you hope to accomplish? Do you want to provide for your family? Do you want to be able to spend more time interacting with your children? Do you want to spend more time outdoors?
How will you be able to scale? Will you have to hire employees to help you with the increased scale? Realistically, how much more time will you be able to spend on scaling? Are there other obligations or responsibilities that could put you towards burnout or failure?
Do you need to scale? Do you actually need to be bigger? Are you doing it because there is a true demand for your product and materials, and are customers snatching up your flowers as soon as they are available? Or are you doing it because you feel you need to be bigger and have a larger scale? Can you actually sell all the flowers you are growing now?
What would happen if you didn’t scale up? This is an interesting scenario to post for us - if we didn’t scale up, we would be perfectly fine as we are. No new clients, no new beds, no new crops, just focusing in on what we are doing now, we’ll be just fine. Of course if the right opportunity comes along we’ll evaluate it to see if it works for us, but there’s nothing wrong with what we’re doing right now, so there’s no need to scale it. Bigger isn’t always better.
I hope that this helps you to feel a bit less pressure to always be scaling or expanding your business. If you are happy with where you are at, or if instead of scaling upwards you want to make your business more effective, or more impactful, you have permission to do so. Don’t always feel that you have to expand in order to be successful.
And if you’re interested in learning more about small scale flower farming in an effective way, you may be interested in these blog posts: