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While there are many valuable books I’d recommend purchasing for anyone wanting to get into flower farming, there are only three that I really consider “must owns” — for the growing side, that’s Cut Flower Garden by Erin Benzakein and Cool Flowers by Lisa Mason Ziegler (or the updated version of the same book by the same author called The Cut Flower Handbook), and for the business side, that’s Flower Farming For Profit by Lennie Larkin, hands down.
Flower Farming For Profit is the book I wished would have been published back when we first started our farm. Thanks to the aforementioned books on growing, I had the resources I needed to figure out how to farm cut flowers, but there virtually was almost nothing on the business side available, except for smaller, somewhat outdated sections in The Flower Farmer by Lynn Byczynski and The Flower Farmer’s Year by Georgie Newbery. Even online, it wasn’t much better — almost all the YouTube channels, blog posts, etc. focused almost exclusively on the growing side, with maybe casual mentions of the actual business side of things.
I tried to address the lack I saw here on my blog, which is why I created my series on how to start a backyard flower farm. I wrote that series to start to address some of the questions I found the hardest to find answers to when I was starting out.
When Flower Farming for Profit came out in early 2024, I immediately ordered it and devoured it cover to cover. So many times while reading, I would exclaim, “Yes! YES! Finally!! Yes!!!!” because the book addressed all the questions I’d run up against trying to run the business side of the farm but not having resources to turn to for guidance.
In case you haven’t had the pleasure yet of reading the book for yourself, here are five of the biggest takeaways from the book for me:
1 – Instead of setting some vague sales target or just “winging it” with your profit plan, start with the profit you’re needing/wanting to make and then figure out the yearly, monthly, and weekly targets to get you there.
I was totally guilty of the vague profit target when I first started our flower farm. Heck, I didn’t even plan for PROFIT at all — I just set a general overall sales target that sounded reasonable! In fact–full disclosure here–I didn’t make a very specific profit plan until this last season, actually.
But it has made a HUGE difference on every level, and I only wish I would have done it much, much sooner.
Basically, you start with setting an overall profit goal for the year. This means you need to have a pretty decent idea of what your expenses are, since profit = overall sales – expenses.
Therefore, if you want to make $15,000 in profit but have $10,000 in expenses for the year, you need a sales plan that’s going to make you an overall $25,000.
If you already have a season or two under your belt, this is obviously going to be a bit easier since you’ll have some established sales channels and hard numbers. If you don’t, take your best guess.
Basically, you want to estimate overall sales targets in each of the revenue streams you have with your farm. Let’s say you do farmer’s markets, CSA bouquet subscriptions, and sell to one florist. When you’re planning your profit plan for the next year, think about what the demand has been like in each of those, and try to set an overall number that’s a stretch over the year before but not out of the realm of possibility.
So maybe you say you want to sell $15,000 at farmer’s markets, $6,000 in CSA subscriptions, and $4,000 to florists to get to your $25,000.
Then you need to figure out how many weeks are in your typical growing/selling season and divide your overall target number by that number of weeks or number of one-off sales that need to be sold (like a wedding package or a bouquet subscription). Let’s say you have roughly a 25-week season that you sell flowers. That means that each week, you need to average $600 at your farmer’s market, sell 30 CSA subscriptions at $200 apiece, and sell $160 on average every week to your florist to hit your overall sales goal of $25,000.
Once I’d actually sat down and done this, it felt like such a DUH moment because I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought to do this before. It’s been a total game changer for planning and marketing on every level.
2 – Plan out your crops based on what you can sell, not just on what you can grow.
Many people who get into flower farming are actually new in the world of agriculture and sometimes fairly new to the gardening/growing world in general. Therefore, when starting out, often a very haphazard approach is used when planning out your beds and what actually to plant. Often you’ll just plant what you know is easy and that you can grow or you just grab random flowers and perennials that you personally think are pretty and throw them all together. Sometimes you try and take a more systematic approach and go through recommendations like what’s found in Cut Flower Garden, but since you don’t know what you don’t know, you just figure you’ll plant ALLLL the things so you can make sure you have everything you need.
I know this is definitely what I did.
Now, there are definitely some benefits to growing all the things at the beginning — you gain a lot of experience with many different types of plants and flowers, and you start to notice what naturally thrives for you and what’s a bit trickier. However, a problem can definitely start to form if you continue to focus only on what you CAN grow, rather than on what you can SELL.
Those are two very different things.
Let’s take statice, for example. I’m great at growing statice. I’ve grown full beds of it in the past because I could generally rely on it to be high yielding, decently tall, and a useful filler. However, my local florists aren’t that interested in my statice because they can get it just as cheaply from the wholesaler, and it’s not like it’s such a “wow” flower that it sells bouquets for me. In fact, I find that a lot of it tends to go to waste simply because I don’t think to reach for it when I’m making up my wrapped bouquets.
If I was heavy into selling dried flowers, it would be a totally different story, but I’m not, so continuing to grow a bed of statice every year makes zero sense for me.
Snapdragons, on the other hand, are something I grow well AND I sell a ton of. I can sell large amounts of them through nearly all of my sales channels, and it is rare that I don’t have a bouquet that has at least some snaps in it if I have any currently available for me. Therefore, that’s a crop that’s worth looking into a little more.
3 – Know your cost to grow.
It’s not enough simply to know that you can grow a crop well and even sell a lot of it. To be a smart farmer, you need to know if you’re actually making any money on that crop.
I have two crops I grow that I somewhat consider “loss leaders” because I make hardly any money on them (or lose money) — tulips and stock. I continue to grow them because they help me sell other flowers that I can grow for a profit, but I did have to step back and realize that I actually was losing money on those, so I needed to be very careful about how much of them I planned for.
Figuring out your cost to grow down to the exact dollars and cents is super time consuming, and I’ll admit that I haven’t done it personally to the exact cent on any of my crops. However, I have done general calculations to at least get a pretty good idea, and the results have been pretty eye opening.
To figure out your cost to grow something, you need to factor in ALL things that go into that crop — planning and choosing varieties, making purchases, starting and caring for seedlings (if applicable), transplanting, maintaining (watering, weeding, staking, etc.), harvesting, and then arranging. Then you look at your average yield per plant and the price you can sell each stem for, and you have a decent idea of how much it costs you to grow that crop.
Tulips and stock are single stem producers, meaning I only get one sellable stem (if I’m lucky) from each seed or bulb. Both are high labor crops — tulips require trenching in the fall, sometimes watering by hand during the winter (if we’re having a dry spell), covering with frost cloth during sharp cold spells during vulnerable periods in its growth cycle, and then harvesting by the bulb, hosing off the dirt, dry storing in a cooler, etc. etc. So if I get a fancy tulip bulb that costs me around 60 cents per bulb and then turn around and sell it for $2, it might SEEM that I’ve made a profit. But when you factor in all the hours of labor plus the fact that I’ve never had anything close to 100% success with tulips (some years it’s been as bad as 10%), it’s definitely a loss for sure.
Before, I counted ANY crop that sold as profitable. But starting to run some general calculations, I’ve been pretty surprised by what I’ve found.
(Oh, and snapdragons? Still highly worth my time, since I can get much more than one stem off of each plant over the course of the season — usually more like 8-10.)
4 – Simplify and minimize your crop list.
After reading #2 and #3, then #4 just makes sense. It doesn’t make sense to keep growing things that aren’t profitable or don’t have a definite purpose in your sales plan or that don’t sell, period. But even if you can grow something well AND it sells pretty well AND it’s fairly profitable still doesn’t mean you should grow it.
This is where you look at the big picture of what you want your farm to be — what do you want your lifestyle to look like? How can you make this sustainable long term?
It’s also worth noting that traditional farmers often spend decades perfecting how to grow just ONE crop. If you’re trying to grow 80 different things, you will basically be the specialist of none of them.
I’ll admit, this one’s still really hard for me because I LOVE to grow all the things. I love having all the different options, I love variety, and I love that when I’m working on something like a wedding or special custom order, I often will have just the thing to make it stand out and be different because I grow so many things.
However, there are so many benefits to simplifying your crop list.
You start to tap into how to grow something REALLY well, first off. You streamline your processes because every crop has different needs, so the fewer crops you can grow, the fewer specialized care plans you need to come up with for everything. When you’re harvesting a lot of just one thing, it goes SOOO much faster. It’s easier to make wrapped bouquets or arrangements from a recipe.
I might only be simplifying my crop list from 80 different things down to 60 different things for this next season, but I figure it’s all progress in the right direction 🙂
5 – Finally, look for ways to be more efficient in your farming.
My husband has a background in Lean Six Sigma, which is all about streamlining operations and processes in manufacturing and operations, so this wasn’t a totally new idea for me. However, I hadn’t realized how many inefficiencies I had with our flower farm until I really started paying attention to it —
- the 15 minutes spent most days looking for some tool or other
- not harvesting quite enough ingredients for whatever bouquet I’m working on, so I need to go from one end of the farm to the other to get “just a few more things”
- not planting the same type of sunflower next to each other and just mixing all the seeds up so that I need to walk along the whole row, picking out just the ones I want from amidst so many others
- not planting all the celosia together, so I have to walk from one bed to the next looking for the ones I want
- pulling out stems one at a time from buckets to make subscription bouquets rather than just creating a recipe and laying out all the stems in piles on a table
- etc. etc. etc.
Seriously, I didn’t realize how much of what I was doing was totally inefficient until I started looking for it. It was truly astounding to me to see how much time I was wasting just because of poor planning, poor setup, or my own bad habits (like not putting my harvest snips back in the same place every time).
I hope that gave you a pretty good taste of the kinds of gems you can pick up from Flower Farming for Profit, and hopefully it helped you see why I consider it a true “must own” for anyone in the flower farming world. If you want to purchase a copy right now, you can do that HERE.
Drop any comments or questions you have below!! I’m always happy to help 🙂
