Seed firms see growth opportunity
Home gardens trendy as food prices rise
Travis Milley expects by the time he does a final tally for 2022 he’ll have sold 24,000 chicks.
The manager of the Eastern Farmers Co-op in Mount Pearl, N.L., says demand for the young birds has been increasing as more people turn their backyards into hobby farms.
Since the pandemic began in 2020, he said the co-operative has had sales increases of 25 per cent in pretty well every department.
“This year we expect another increase in sales,” he told Saltwire.
The other thing he’s noticed is that younger people are getting interested in gardening. Milley said his customers range from 20-something novices to 70-year-old experienced gardeners.
“Their level of investment ranges from a few simple backyard planters and raised beds, or a small bed of carrots of cabbage to see how it works, to customers who grow so much they have produce to sell.”
While the Co-op has been able to manage the increased business with its usual staff of nine, Milley said the business may have to add some more space for extra products.
They’re busy now pretty much year-round, he said, with people shopping for gardening supplies in the winter to get ready for the next season.
“This was the first year we had people coming in here in January looking for fertilizer. So we unlocked our trailers and started selling.”
Gardening supplies are also becoming sought-after Christmas gifts, he said.
“We’re talking about adding an extension to the back just so we can store more product year round.”
WIDESPREAD INTEREST
The trend toward backyard gardening is also happening in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and elsewhere.
According to a report by Dalhousie University, in collaboration with Angus Reid, more than a million households in Canada intend to garden for the first time in 2022.
The report says Ontario and the Atlantic provinces have seen the highest increase of people gardening since the start of the pandemic.
“Gardening is clearly getting a second wind in Canada due to COVID. Results clearly show that gardening remains a popular activity in Canada, even two years into the pandemic,” said Sylvain Charlebois, director of Dalhousie’s Agri-food Analytics Lab.
Charlebois said the study also investigated reasons why Canadians grow food at home. About 49 per cent of respondents said they believed the food they grow is of better quality than the food they buy at a store, while 41 per cent do it to save money.
However, many Canadians still do not garden, said Charlebois, because they feel they don’t have the space, don’t have time or they don’t know enough about gardening to start.
The study also showed that of the people who plan to start gardening for the first time this year, nearly half are 34 or younger.
NEW GENERATION
That information doesn’t surprise John Barrett.
The sales director for Vesey’s Seeds on Prince Edward Island said their typical customers used to be 55 or over. Since 2020, however, younger people have been tilling soil and planting seeds.
“For the past year and a half or so our top demographic has been 25 to 34, followed by 35 to 44,” Barrett told Saltwire.
Vesey’s is the largest importer of Dutch bulbs in Canada. Barrett said they’re also the largest mail-order seed supplier in Canada, with customers across the country as well as in the United States.
In the year COVID came to Canada, he said, they saw a surge in orders. With nowhere to go because of travel restrictions, people turned to their backyards to keep busy.
The 81-year-old seed and supply company had a year busier than they thought they would, said Barrett.
“Our business doubled from a normal year,” he said.
They weren’t sure what to expect going into 2021, he said. With travel restrictions relaxed and people going back to work, the big question, he said, was whether new gardeners from 2020 would lose interest in their hobby.
They didn’t, and that meant more business for Vesey’s.
“We didn’t anticipate that we would maintain such incredible growth, but in 2021 we were slightly higher again than we were in 2020.”
While the orders this year are down a little compared to 2021, he said, the business is still “miles and miles and miles ahead of where we were in 2019 or early 2020.”
Barrett said it seems a lot of new gardeners that came to the hobby during the pandemic had success and are sticking with it.
While sales of flower seeds and bulbs were steady, the growing demand was for vegetable seeds, he said. That means busy days for the 194 staffers at Vesey’s who have to fill all those orders.
Rising food costs this year will likely keep people busy tending to those backyard vegetable gardens, Barrett said.
He said he doesn’t think the trend will change any time soon.
“I think with the economic factors and people’s growing interest in health and environment, there’s no reason home gardening won’t continue to flourish.”