As an industry, floriculture is growing like the weeds
When it comes to arrangement of flowers, art and economics combine
The tension was as thick as the floral scents wafting through the second-floor shelf overlooking the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo cattle barn.
About 300 teenagers from across Texas took turns completing written exams on the art and economics of floriculture. Then they walked around with clipboards, identifying 60 plant varieties, pests and design tools, and judging which of a collection of arrangements were the most and least desirable.
Were flowers too tall and likely to break? Was the arrangement symmetrical? Was the green Styrofoam at the bottom completely concealed?
Two of the students went home with $12,000 scholarships — and head starts in a booming agribusiness.
The floriculture industry is valued at about $43 billion and growing by about 7 percent a year, according to a recent report by N.Y.-based Future Market Insights. Soaring demand and well-orchestrated supply chains are allowing developing countries to get in on the trade.
Cargoes of fresh-cut flowers cross oceans every day on their way to mom-and-pop floral shops, major retailers and, increasingly, online vendors. Researchers are experimenting with gamma rays and genetic mutations to increase vase life and create new ornamental varieties.
Kroger, the nation’s largest grocery chain, will sell enough roses for Valentine’s Day that if lined up stem-by-stem, they would stretch from Houston to London.
Of course, the industry isn’t immune to economic swings. Downturns take a toll as young people wait longer to get married, and tightened purse strings make it harder to justify spending on things other than food, transportation and utilities.
People don’t stop dying, graduating, going to church or celebrating holidays such as Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, though, so flower sales always manage to survive.
“It took a long time for the industry to get back to where it was before the Great Recession,” said Charlie Hall, professor of horticulture at Texas A&M University. “But fortu-
nately, we’re now actually selling more flowers across the country than we did prior to the recession.”
However, because 80 percent of cut flowers are imported, the business is vulnerable to domestic and foreign policy.
That’s why florists across the country were relieved when the five-week temporary government shutdown ended in late January in a truce that will last at least until the day after Valentine’s Day.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal Plant Health Inspection Service, or APHIS, sends additional agents to international airports and U.S.-Mexico border checkpoints to deal with surges of floral imports for Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Easter, Hall said. That includes an additional 13 inspectors to handle South American floral imports through Miami alone.
The fear was the continued shutdown would cause delays that would wilt all those Valentine’s roses, which make up about 20 percent of the year’s floral sales.
Trade disputes can hit the industry in more subtle ways.
“The tariff situation with the trade war that’s going on affects some of the inputs that we use in the floral sector, i.e., floral foam, glassware, some of the what we call upgrades,” Hall said. “You have balloons, you have stickers and you have these little pop-in animals. A lot of that is imported and a significant amount of it from China. So those input costs for florists have increased. … If florists don’t pass those on, then obviously that’s eating into their margins.”
Yet flowers remain big business. Floral and green plant market research firm Prince & Prince, Inc. put last year’s U.S. floral sales for Valentine’s Day at $3.4 billion, with nearly 44 million U.S. households spending on roses, arrangements, bouquets and other products.
Hall likes to highlight floral-industry-commissioned studies that use science to back up what consumers may sense — that flowers enhance mental health, improve workplace performance and even spark improvements in dementia patients.
He said he saw it with his own father, a nursery owner who died last year.
“Any time we could get dad surrounded by plants and flowers, he was a totally different man,” Hall said. “I’ve seen firsthand the stress-reducing impact flowers have and the ability to control negative behaviors on the part of dementia and Alzheimer’s patients.”
But even as the industry expands, fewer people are choosing it as a career.
“We had 45 percent fewer florists in 2017 than we did back in 2001,” he said. “That’s competitive pressure in the marketplace, and, of course, you have supermarket flowers, you have online flowers, 1-800 and FTD and so forth. … While floral consumption is increasing, the share that florists command has been decreasing because of all these alternative channels.”
Cincinnati-based Kroger, for example, now sells more flowers than any other retailer in the world.
Russell Plowman, instructor of floriculture at Texas Tech University and superintendent of the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo floriculture contest, sees the industry on an upswing.
“I think it’s still got a lot of potential and I think finding your niche is going to be the biggest thing — doing specialty work,” he said. “People are always going to want something that’s different or unique.”
Though not necessarily for Valentine’s Day.
“It’s always going to be red roses,” Plowman said. “Always. It’s so funny … I teach floral design at Texas Tech, so I teach the history of floral design. And going back to the Greeks and the Romans, their favorite flower was the rose and their favorite rose was red. The Romans had thousands of acres in production of roses.”
Plowman sees today’s consumers moving away from artificial flowers, popular because they are less expensive and nonperishable, and toward smaller, fresh arrangements.
Also, the industry is rethinking which characteristics are worth breeding.
“There is a trend back to more fragrance,” he said. “You know, any time you breed for something, you lose something else. And fragrance was one that was lost.”
In Plowman’s view, flowers are one of the necessities of life.
“Everybody has flowers in Europe, and that goes for plants, too. Every house has a window box and a garden — they just surround themselves with flowers,” he said. “For me, if I’ve got a dollar and I’ve got a choice between a flower or a piece of bread, I’m probably going to buy the flower.”