Music We love flowers. We love to look at them, arrange them, smell them, give them, receive them, and grow them. We love flowers.
They add beauty and a little magic to our lives. Flowers convey love, encouragement, sympathy, and joy. Today, most of the cut flowers we buy are imported from distant lands. But now, local flower farmers across the U.S. are staging a comeback. I think the main thing that we need to remember about flower farming is that it's farming first and foremost.
We raise crops for a living. Our field crops are the same as if you're raising corn or cotton or cattle. We still have to earn a living by raising crops.
We moved here in 1990 to start a greenhouse business, but within a year or two, decided to start growing some cut flowers. We started with half an acre, and over the years we just increased our acreage, bought more land, and that's our story is we became the premier cut flower grower for central Texas. Nobody in the hill country or anywhere in Texas was growing locally grown cut flowers, and we did that as an offshoot of our greenhouse business, and we took them into town, and we went to the local Whole Foods store, and we said, We're growing cut flowers, would you be interested in carrying local flowers?
And they said, this is incredible, where did you get these? And we said, well, we're out in Blanco, and they said, we want all you can grow. And so we have about the 20 acres in cut flowers, and we also have 22 cold frames and greenhouses that we are able to produce flowers pretty much year-round. Our farm started out selling to grocery stores and florists, and now we also have a retail operation at the corner.
Saturday morning in our blue barn, we hold a farm market. The rest of the week our farm stand is self-serve, but people get this really beautiful, dreamy experience of how great it is to have this farm, and, you know, we're so special, and they come to me and they say, you're living my dream, and I say, oh, you're a nightmare. I originally started the business because I felt very strongly about how the flower industry was going. I read a book called Flower Confidential by Amy Stewart that was really eye-opening to me about how the floral industry on a global level is.
Was disturbing at that time. It has definitely changed since then, thankfully, and I'm very grateful that it has. Locally grown flowers are really coming into their own nowadays.
About five years ago, there really was nobody doing a whole lot of weddings with exclusively locally grown flowers. That's something that's really come into its own in the past few years. And as a result, it's really helped the entire industry grow and become more vibrant as more and more people understand the value of locally grown flowers. We grow on two acres of land in the city of Philadelphia and we work from seed to centerpiece so that means that the flowers that we grow here at the farm are used in the centerpieces from the wedding and we do not buy in other flowers so we really only work with what we can grow ourselves. There's no chemical pesticides or herbicides of any kind used here at the farm.
We also have a lot of animals like ducks and cats and stuff around the farm so I want to be careful of their health. We also have a local specialty food co-op. We deliver once a week to them buckets of bouquets and regular loose stem flowers. The flower buyer at the co-op has been a tremendous supporter for our farm and as a result the farm's community is just growing and building which is what we ultimately want is to have more people appreciate flowers and want to connect with their flower farmer. I am really fortunate to have met Jenny about five years ago when she was just getting started and started bringing her product into our store and it was so well received.
She's been known to be applauded when she when she comes in with the flowers. There are so many great things to local. You know who the farmer is, you know where the product comes from.
what is being used on the product or not being used as in Jenny's case they're wonderfully handled and treated it's really wonderful having her in our backyard a little over three miles away I'm Barbara Lamborn and I own Greenstone Fields in Wheatland, Virginia. I'm a cut flower grower and I'm very fortunate to be in this business. I couldn't imagine doing anything else.
Tonight we're harvesting flowers that are going to go to market tomorrow at the Falls Church Farmers Market. Our customers love us because they expect. longevity out of our flowers and they know that they have a great variety to choose from. Lilies to zinnias to a myriad of celosias, one of my favorites. So here we are from the field to the farmers market at Falls Church, Virginia.
Lots of beautiful flowers to sell that we picked just yesterday. So when we come to market we bring a number of pre-made bouquets. These are examples of our large bouquets.
But we also encourage our customers to build their own bouquets by buying flowers by the stem. And many times what our customers do is just come by on Saturday and buy a couple of new stems because their stems lasted all week because they were so fresh being cut the day before. I'm Deborah. I've shopped farm markets since they first came into this area.
And originally it was just locally grown food, but now we have flowers. And it's food for my soul. This is like part of the whole experience. The colors...
the seasonality and their scent. I mean much of what you can get in you know from florists have been bred for shipping and these were not bred for shipping. This is the real deal. So that's why I'm here every week. My name is John Dole with the Department of Horticultural Science at North Carolina State University.
I've been working with cut flowers for 26 years. In the United States, of course, the first cut flowers were just what people went out into their gardens and harvested. Farms, that's probably a big word to call what was originally done, but the farms stayed, you know, very local with the shop, so to speak. Over time, they got bigger.
and bigger as commercial cut flower production became more important. The industry went from local growers to a certain amount of concentration when they could ship flowers. And then growers started concentrating in Colorado and California.
By the latter part of the 20th century, the flower industry started shipping from overseas and the growers in Colorado and then the growers in California found that they couldn't compete with roses anymore because they were coming in from Ecuador and Colombia so inexpensively. In 1991, Congress created the Andean Trade Preference Act, eliminating tariffs on flowers and other products from Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. The result? About 80% of flowers sold in the U.S. today are imported. It left many of our small to medium-sized growers in the United States out in the cold.
The full big system right now is set up. There's a grower in Columbia, sends it to the United States. It then gets shipped by air or by truck to a wholesaler or a retailer. It then goes from that to the florist or to the supermarket. It's a really long chain.
Because so much of the production is going overseas, when the flower does get to a consumer in a store, it's already so old. If you go to a grocery store and buy a bouquet, typically those flowers have been in boxes, not in water, and they just can't have their freshness. They also have to cut them less developed, less open, so that they can be put in the boxes without being damaged.
More local growers can cut it open with more color showing and without it getting damaged. Import it, you just can't do that. And all those flowers are often grown in less than sustainable manners.
Sometimes they're grown with a lot of pesticides. Aside from those concerns, there's a question about the fuel and the carbon footprints of getting things shipped here. At Weaver's Way, we do buy wholesale flowers, but they come from South America. The carbon footprint on them is we don't even talk about.
The chemical use, we don't talk about. There's no comparison. Jenny Love.
three miles away, lovingly packaged, beautifully grown, and they are so fresh. We've had people come to our farm and they say, I want to pick up flowers for a wedding. If I pick them up on Friday, will they last until Saturday?
And we say, one day, they'll last a whole week. They're a good value, they're going to last, and they're going to be worth the money. You also know your farmer and you know what they're doing, how they're growing them. And you can also know that your dollars are going back into your own economy instead of being shipped out to another country. Some flower farmers, like Keith Kramer of Mount Joy, Pennsylvania, are taking old family farms into new territory, locally and regionally.
In the early years of Kramer's Posy Patch, we were producing probably 35 to 50 acres of dry product, and we were able to move it all easily. And then the bottom kind of dropped out on that. In the mid-'90s, late-'90s, it started getting really soft. At that time, we had to make a decision.
What were we going to do? Ultimately, we decided that because of the scale we're used to operating at and with the equipment we have and the land we have available to us, that we would pursue the wholesale flower market and fresh flowers. Once we got our foot in the door, we offer what we think is a superior product to them.
With the high tunnels extending the season, we have product longer than we would normally. And overall, that's the trend that we see, is that the wholesalers in the Mid-Atlantic are really looking for good locally grown product. In the urban heart of Baltimore, Ellen Frost represents a new wave of florists, buying and selling only locally grown flowers. We started Local Color Flowers back in 2008. And the goal was really to bridge the gap between growers and consumers in Baltimore in the surrounding regions.
Before starting the business, I worked on a farm here in Baltimore County and got to know farmers in our region, flower farmers specifically. We wanted to make sure that the money that we had was being spent on growers that we knew in communities that we lived in. Probably in the first four years of our business, what we were finding is that a lot of our growers were aging. So what we decided to do, since we weren't finding the existing new growers, we thought, well, we'll try to develop some new growers.
At Butterby Farm, just five miles from downtown Baltimore, one of Ellen's young protégés has started a thriving business. Well, the local movement in Baltimore is starting to get big in terms of flowers, mostly because of Ellen Frost and her studio. She got me started and she got probably at least five other growers, young growers in the area started. And we're all friends and share information.
So that's been really wonderful. There's a lot of enthusiasm from people. We get emails all the time. You know, can I come see your farm?
Can I come pick my own flowers? People are really interested. When we buy flowers from local growers. We support our community's economy, provide employment, promote rural livelihood, and preserve open, green spaces.
But there's even more that we can do. Encourage others to seek out the shops, stores, and markets that sell local flowers, and support the growing movement to label them. Local flowers are truly fresh and long-lasting, produced in great seasonal variety, and in a wide range of colors.
color, form, and fragrance. They increase biodiversity, healthy soil, and water conservation. And then there are the intangible qualities of beautiful local flowers. They just make us feel better, reducing the stress of modern life, connecting us to one another through the holidays, special occasions, and important events. that serve as milestones of our lives.
Find your local growers and florists at ASCFG.org. Then, stop by and smell the flowers.