Importance of Deciding on a Product Before Crop Planning
Okay… the title is a little misleading, I would actually call this process the first step in crop planning!
The first year for the flower farmer has a lot of dreaming and hope but it also involves a lot of planning. From deciding on a business name to sowing seeds to selling cut flowers and everything in between. It is a full plate to say the least! Of course, the fun part we are all looking forward to is all the pretty flowers at the end, am I right?
Purchasing the seeds, corms, bulbs and tubers is the first real step to those pretty flowers. Or at least the more fun first step.
Before pulling the trigger on that $600 seed order, let’s talk over a few details that will help you to better decide which crops are the best fit for you to grow in your first season. We’re coming from the angle of talking to first year flower farm but if you are an established flower farmer wanting to re-evaluate your product offerings and dive into target marketing you will hopefully find this helpful too!
Hopefully at this stage in your first year business planning, you have figured out your budget and growing space. We are getting so close to my favorite part- buying seeds! Okay… you probably already have a good stash of seeds…moving on!
To help you begin crop planning let’s go over three main details:
Length of season you desire to sell
Your target market
Your final product
What?! How is that crop planning?! Well, it is the beginning steps of crop planning for a flower farming business.
Each of these details play off one another and will ultimately give you a better direction on which crops to focus on for your upcoming season of flower farming and begin goal planning for subsequent seasons.
Let’s dive into these details a little further.
Season Length
When growing, especially field growing, most climates have a limited growing season. Particularly in the beginning while you are trying to wrap your head around frost dates and days to maturity, you may not have a full grasp of the length your growing season actually is or can be. Over the years as you gain in experience, gain infrastructure and learn season extensions along with off-season offerings you will find that if you allow for it, you will have a couple weeks off for Christmas before getting back to it. You may also find that you don’t want to work year round on the flower farm. Perhaps you want to really be specialized and offer one specialty cut flower crop, such as roses or dahlias. Perhaps you want to push the length of the growing/selling season to its max or maybe you only want to offer crops in spring or fall.
There is a lot of flexibility for customization. After all, it is your flower farm, it is your business. Curate and mold it to fit you and your vision. Looking at your target market, especially if you’re in a tourist destination let’s say, will also help you to decide when you want to have product to sell.
Each season has pros and cons.
Spring and fall are considered “shoulder seasons.” These seasons can be the toughest ones to have consistent product and can be more expensive, but you may also find that’s when your flowers have the highest demand.
Spring bulbs and corms come with a hefty upfront price, especially when you are comparing them to the cost of some sunflower or zinnia seeds. Aside from the upfront cost they can also be more labor intensive and in need of more attention such as frost cloth, tunnels, etc. Many spring crops such as tulips are often considered a “loss leader” for flower farmers. Too mild of a winter, no tulips. Too severe of a winter, no tulips. On top of that, tulips can be a difficult crop to get a good return on, especially when you are developing your customer base. On the plus side, spring flowers are some of the first flowers a flower farmer has in the beginning of the growing season. Spring blooms are used to capture people, and hopefully to turn them into customers that stay with you for the remainder of the growing season. Most times, our customers who are with us in spring stay with us the rest of the season. After the long winter months of brown dead looking trees and grey skies folks are hungry for color, beauty and decadent scents that comes with the life of spring.
Fall is also a challenging time, the first kill frost is lurking just around the corner, powdery mildew is settling in and the inevitable end of season burnout that we all face is taking root. This is when we are beginning to flirt with the end of the growing season. Aside from protecting crops from the nips of frost (normally if we protect them these two nights we can prolong our season for another two to four weeks!), we are also back into balancing our time between pushing final sales, prepping for fall planting and preparing for holiday offerings.
However, this is when we see an up tick in demand for flowers. After the home gardens have come and gone people are still wanting pretty flowers we are there to fill their desires. It's amazing, people have come to learn, if they don’t get them in fall they won’t be getting flowers again until spring!
Summer isn’t all sunshine and rainbows either! You might not have to fuss over frosts but instead you are battling bugs, heat and exhaustion form pushing yourself with all the extra daylight. For us, it is also when a lot of our customers go on vacation and sales can dip down.
Aside from the growing season with fresh cut product you also have the off season products to consider. This will affect how many everlasting flowers, such as gomphrena, that you may want to plan to not only have during the growing season but also to dry and have for Christmas wreaths or quirky dried flower offerings for Valentine’s Day.
Over the years, you may find yourself pushing to have product nearly year round to sell, or perhaps you are in a climate that you can grow year round. Nonetheless, you will need to decide what seasons interest you to have product offerings in. Then you need to decide what is reasonable for you to take on your first year of flower farming. A lot of these offerings can be a gamble the first year, without having a market built up and uncertain sales. However, you might be kicking yourself for not have products to offer your customers in a season you didn’t plan on having an offering in but the demand is there. This is why you want to have a plan for you season and to have determined what parts of the year you will have product for. Going back to your budget to figure out what is manageable and reasonable is the best way to answer this.
In January as you are pouring over seed catalogs, having product spring through Christmas might sound like a great idea! It can be a great plan but it can also be exhausting. Don’t overload yourself. On the other hand, if you are able to lengthen your season it will keep you in the forefront of your customer’s minds. We are highly seasonal, it can be challenging to be remembered, especially with in those early years. Flower farming takes a lot of effort and we need maximize the sales that the farm can generate even in the off season.
(Our season typically goes April through frost then Christmas orders before getting back to seed sowing for spring.)
Target Market
Oh yeah, going back to good old high school economics class!
This topic can get really complicated, after all people get entire degrees off of it! I’m sure you understand what a target market is but just in case let’s make it rather simple: who is your ideal customer you want to sell to? Hint, we are typically not our ideal customers. Obviously, because we are the doers, we are making it happen, we want to grow the flowers not buy them.
As the doers we are aiming for the people who want to pay us to be the growers, the variety experts, the designers. That is an extremely broad net and in the beginning, your net is going to be wide. Each experience and year, your net will lessen. You will be revisiting and refining who your target market is on a regular basis.
To begin choosing your target market, begin with what you want your brand and product to say (or not say). For us, I wanted customers who wanted a more eco-conscious choice for locally grown flowers, who would prefer to see an aphid on their sweet pea and know it’s because we choose to grow with more sustainable practices. We wanted customers who appreciated the ephemeral beauty of local flowers within their rightful seasons. As the years have gone by, it has been refined more but overall the core is the same. We have different target markets depending on which product we are focusing on such as bouquet subscriptions versus weddings. Overall, our customers are relaxed, flexible and are fans of the unique flowers we bring.
You will also need to learn who is in your existing market. For example, our small town is a retirement and agriculture community but a fairly wealthy one with some disposable income who likes to have luxurious experiences. Many of the the retirees are from the Bay Area, they have an appreciation for small business, fresh eco conscious products and a human to earth connection. We provide that. We are also close to a huge tourist destination which translates to destination weddings. We are also close to Reno, which brings a different demand for our products, since there tends to be a younger customer base who are looking for a treat and something pretty in between the grind of their everyday lives.
Take the time to observe the market in your area or in the area you intend to sell product in. Look at the different demographics such as age, gender and income. You also want to dive in a little further with looking at psychographics the “why” behind the purchase. For example, our ideal customers want flowers grown and handled in an eco-conscious manner. In a more modern world you also want to look at what your ideal customer’s preferred sales outlets are. Do they prefer the traditional outlets such as a farmer’s markets, or do they want to be able to handle everything easily, without fuss online? You also want to consider where your ideal customer will be getting their information from and how they will be seeing your content. In person? On social media? In a periodical add? Going back to the demographics will also help you asses better how to best market your product and become known to your ideal customer. Get specific! It will help you to better target your ideal customers.
Final Product
Now that we have an idea of who our ideal customer is, we need to figure out which products we want to provide for that ideal customer. Like I said in the beginning, ultimately that product is flowers, right? Kind of… It’s how you decide to package up that end product so to speak.
To break this down a little more simple: is your main product meant to last a week on your customer’s kitchen table or for one day at a wedding?
Simply put, if you are thinking you are mainly going to sell at a local Farmer’s Market as your sales outlet then your final product is going to be different than if you are mainly selling event florals out of your home studio.
Event florals are typically more expensive, luxurious flowers than what you will commonly find at a Farmer’s Market. Fluffy specialty ranunculus, peonies, garden roses and dahlias to name a few.
Event florals are also flowers in their peak, fully open and are only meant to last for the day of the event. Typically, local flowers will last longer but there is no guarantee past the event date. Once flowers are in their peak, it goes downhill from there. The petals begin to fall and color changes, the flowers are officially dying. The bride purchased her bridal bouquet to have with her for her special day: it should be beautiful, fluffy and what the bride wanted but it does not have to make it past the night.
If you sold flowers in their peak at a farmer’s market to a customer expecting to have fresh flowers for the week, well, you would have a highly dissatisfied customer on your hands. A bouquet intended for a customer’s kitchen table, such as a farmer’s market bouquet, should have flowers at different bloom stages along with a variety of flowers that have a decent vase life. Open blooms to draw the customers in and give that instant satisfaction but some closed blooms to give the bouquet a longer vase life for the customer. Some cosmos laced in between those strawflowers to give a longer vase life as well. Farmer’s market customers are looking to watch the song and dance of the flowers, that you lovingly grew, over the week they have them on their kitchen table. Typically you aren’t going to fill those bouquets with Cafe au lait dahlias but rather cornel ones! Those flowers are to enchant and captivate them until they get to do it all over again the following week.
You need to decide what you want your main final product to be and who you intend to sell that product to. These products can be mixed and have a snowball effect on each other but prioritize your main product you desire to sell. This main product can shift throughout the season. Your main product in May is going to look different than you main product in December.
Am I making sense?
Capitalizing on the snowball effect
We custom grow more and more each year for our wedding clients but those flowers can also snowball into other offerings. You need to grow more product for a single event than will actually be needed for that day, but what do you do with all the extra?
Our solution to this are our bouquet subscriptions. It allows us to provide beautiful blooms to our community, with the flexibility of using certain colors/varieties for an event that we crop planned for. Meaning, some weeks our bouquet subscription members won’t see a single stem of peach while others they will be spoiled by it. During the peak of the season we do pop ups at local shops (or even in our own field!), as well as selling extra flowers to other event florist friends and even sometimes we pepper in a custom order or two. Since our main product are event florals, we have the flexibility to grow more luxurious crops without worrying about not being able to recoup that cost. The snowball affect allows us to grow the lush flowers, grow something special for our event couples along with giving our subscription members some of those luxurious flowers at a more affordable price. For our events we also grow a lot of everlastings: they are great to use in boutonnieres, corsages, flower crowns. The extra everlastings snowball into our subscription bouquets and then finally into dried flowers for holiday sales.
Now, I am using our business as an example but this is not the only possible path. It is not even the only products that can have that snowball effect. Perhaps your main product is bouquet subscriptions and the extras can flow into a farmer’s market. Perhaps your main product is to sell wholesale, the extras can flow into bouquet subscriptions. Plan your main product out and what varieties and colors you want to feature in it then plan out subsequent products that can also be sold through that. Keep in the back of your mind, if you are looking to sell bouquets for fifteen dollars, grow flowers that are fifteen dollars worth. Do not over value or undervalue. Flowers that take more resources to grow, cost more up front or just in general are more fussy may not fit into your main product or what you want to take on your first year flower farming: write out those pros and cons. Once you have your main product and laid out your secondary products you can begin investing in the appropriate seeds, tubers, plugs, etc. With your first year flower farm budget in hand and your allotted growing space for the season, you should be able to start crop planning, yay!
We are now one step closer to launching the flower farm dream into a reality.
It is beyond tempting to snag the seed packet of every pretty flower but if you are going to purchase them, they need to be purchased with the intent that the variety add to your final product. Sit down and think about what you want your product, your brand to say. Figure out who your ideal customer is, how they like to shop and where you will find them. Also, begin assessing your local market or the market you intend to sell in. Once you have an idea of who you are planning on selling to then you can begin working on the what; what will your main product be? Flowers for the kitchen table or one day event florals? Lastly, begin thinking of subsequent product offerings that can have a snowball effect to move those extra stems.
I hope this post helps give you a little idea of where to begin marketing and deciding on which crops to grow that will create your final product. Seemingly two unrelated topics that are actually tightly woven together; product offerings and crop planning. Attached, I created a little work sheet that you can print out and hopefully begin seeing your planning process and vision coming to life. I know sometimes I need to scribble my thoughts out of my head to see it all come together!
Happy Flower Farming!
We are looking forward to helping you hand blooms soon!
Jessica & Graham
Flower farming friends!
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We have a lot of great content from our blogs to videos to help you, whether you are just getting started or in need of some different approaches to your flower farming operation! We also realize that it’s a lot of content to puzzle your way through and some thrive with a more structured approach which is why we are doing the challenge! Plus, we have some invaluable tools accessible to subscribers… did I mention we are doing this all for FREE?
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