Flower Farming for Profit

Book excerpt: With practical, step-by-step instructions and on-the-ground examples at every scale, Flower Farming for Profit is a comprehensive, beautiful guide to achieving profitability as a cut flower farmer. When Lennie Larkin set out to become a flower farmer, she found all sorts of resources about growing flowers but a scarcity of reliable information on how to build a profitable cut flower business. How do you create efficient systems and adequately value your own time and effort through your pricing? When and how should you consider scaling up your farm? How can you make doing what you love support you financially? In Flower Farming for Profit, Larkin answers these questions—and many, many more. With instructive lessons and savvy business tips from her own and other successful farms around the world, she explores: • The diverse challenges of both wholesale and retail sales channels, from florists and farm stands to farmers markets • Streamlining weddings for the farmer-florist, from communications to floral design • Efficient recordkeeping and bookkeeping • Steps for conducting your own cost-of-production analysis • Marketing and growth strategies • Business planning, goal setting, and making financial projections • Crop planning based on local climatic conditions, market demand, and sales projections The cut flower industry continues to experience wild growth. To successfully do what they love while expanding the market for sustainably produced flowers, new and experienced farmers alike must deliberately step back from the field and into the office. Flower Farming for Profit is a one-of-a-kind guide to creating the type of numbers-driven business that will allow individual farms to prosper and local flower economies to thrive.