NEW FLOWER FARMERS NEED TO HEAR THIS!

What does it really take to be a flower farmer? We're at the crack of dawn right now. We have a wholesale order to fill today and we have to fill an order for a farmer's market tomorrow. There's the moon. The main farm is about 20 minutes from my house so that means I have to leave pretty early to get here as sunrise comes up. It hasn't even came up quite yet. Right now I'm preparing behind me. I have a wagon and I need to get some buckets so we can get started cutting. I've got the buckets now behind me. I'm already about 40 minutes into my day and haven't even cut the first flower. I've got my coffee. I've got the buckets ready to go and now I'm about to head down each of these aisles here. But I want you to stop and think for a minute. Where does your flowers come from? Well in some cases they might come from here or other cases they might come from out of the U.S. When you usually think of farming you don't usually think of flowers. It's mostly produce. A lot of our flowers here in the United States are imported and they're probably coming from Israel or Jerusalem or Mexico or South Africa or South America. There's so many places that your flowers are coming from and when they hit the stores that's why they don't have a long shelf life. Here at the farm we're growing mostly dahlias that you can see down through here. There's certain varieties on certain rows and we have about 1,300 that we're growing. That consists of taking all week. When you also think of flower farming a lot of people would think that it's easy. It's cold which is good. We had a heavy rain come through yesterday but most of the time it's very hot out here and you can't cut but only certain times in the morning and the afternoons because in the middle of the day it wilts. With that being said you're very crunched in the day morning and afternoon to even try to make a dollar. Not alone just are you cutting but you have to bunch these. You have to grade them. You have to put them in buckets together. You have to load them up. You have to take them to the market. You have to deliver them at the market. Then you have to return home and do it again. So there's a lot consistent in one day. Today we're just cutting. We're going to go down through here and cut a little bit. Me consistently by myself I can cut about 150 stems an hour. Some people might be much faster but 150 stems is pretty good for me in an hour. So you have about three to four hours that you can cut. On average two to three hundred stems because you have to stop a little bit. You have to be able to bunch. So two to three hundred stems and a three to four hour time crunch. That's about a dollar a stem. Let's talk about the number one thing that you need to have before you get started flower farming. One would be land. That's the number one. The second one is dedication. You can see right here that I'm already soaked all the way down. I've got it all the way up me. Both arms soaked. It's about 60 degrees outside. My hands are already hurting. Imagine when it gets a little bit colder. I've maybe done around 30 cuts so far and they're in the bucket down there on the back of the wagon. I have so much more to go. I have some there. Turn it around here 180. All the way down to that building almost. So there you go and they're all ready to cut. As far as dedication goes I really don't see a lot of people or hear a lot of people cutting flowers. It's a different type of agriculture really. Yes you get to look at flowers but they die very quickly and most of them you cannot eat. Like the dahlias what are you doing with them? They're for emotional standpoints. From when you're born all the way to death there's a flower involved. Do you know where the flower comes from? Probably not. So the biggest thing that I would say is the dedication because there will be a burnout and that's in the situation that I am in right now. You just have to keep learning to go through it because right now I didn't want to get up this morning to come out here and cut honestly if I was to be true and here I am cutting. One because it has to be done. Two because I know that there's something better behind all this. For the most part I know that I'm rambling on but if you stay with me I'm going to go and walk you through the market and what I'm going to do this afternoon. The next biggest concern that you're going to have is money. Where are you going to get the money from? What are you going to do with the money? How will you purchase? It's a lot of those things you think as a farmer. Don't downgrade yourself for saying that you're just a flower farmer. If you're going to be a flower farmer be a flower farmer. There is a job for every need in this world and one of them is having flowers. Majority of people would not even know where to start with the flowers if it wasn't for the farmer. Look down through here all the way to the end of the first section in this row right here there's about a hundred plants. So if you take a hundred plants and you multiply it by two dollars that's two hundred dollars a row plus your t-post plus your plastic plus your line you're looking at about five hundred dollars a row. Now five hundred dollars a row what will it bring? If you have one plant in here at two dollars a tuber that is going to consistently grow over time and years and you can divide that every three years what are you going to have? If you have the market for it which we'll talk about in a few minutes you have income. Each one of these are producing about two stems per week equaling out to two dollars. If you have a hundred of these producing two stems a week at one dollar a piece that is two hundred dollars. So two hundred dollars for one row at the minimum. Now look at that that was two hundred dollars you probably have about a hundred bucks in t-post eight dollars in string fifty dollars in plastic. So then the only next thing that you would have is your irrigation. If you really had to you could water them by hand because two hundred dollars is a good start but add two more and you have six hundred bucks. That is on the bare minimum. Some of these rows are making four and five hundred dollars a week. The next biggest thing is finding your market. As I said this morning when we first started I was filling in a wholesale order that's what I'm doing right now. Now there's wholesale ordering there's CSAs there are farmers markets there are you pick there you pick bouquets there's all kinds of things that you can do but you really have to make sure that you're wide open to almost every option and the reason why is because it's a hard market. From my family to yours we are a one income household which means I've got a lot of work to do. That's me telling you that you can do this you really can. I'm in my first year and profiting almost every week and almost selling out every week if not selling out every week the past three weeks I've sold out every week. Going through and cutting these beautiful flowers we have peach orange fuchsia pink yellow. As I was going through here and cutting was don't over diverse yourself and what I mean by that is pick 10 different flowers a couple perennials maybe two or three perennials and the rest annuals so that you'll have a good return on your yield and see how that does for you in the first year. Don't over diverse it will make you burn out very quickly because you have so much and you're trying to learn so much on that curve. Figure out a few of them master a few of them and then move on. You didn't really ask for my input here but if you're still watching at this point some of the things that I would tell you to grow in a first year or even second third fourth is dahlias, sunflowers, zinnias, sedum and ageratum maybe some rutabaga which is otherwise known as black eyed susans. They are all profitable just remember to have a good market strategy when you're trying to diverse yourself. Next thing is your mentor. I'm getting my feet all wet here what's really going to propel you forward in your growth as being a full-time farmer for me what does it take is having a mentor. You kind of need somebody that has already been through it you need a good source of answers maybe your extension office maybe a group on facebook maybe a group on youtube but you really need to get tied in with some people that are already doing it those are the people that are going to help you and it's going to help you launch forward and if you're having trouble with pests or some sort of rot or just anything your yield or your marketing because to say hey maybe try this i've tried wholesaling i've tried retailing i've tried farmers markets i've tried csa's i've tried quite a few things right now what i'm trying to do is put them all together to see what's worked best as i said before that we are in one income household so we have to do whatever it takes to get us to be profitable i'm willing to do whatever it takes to get us profitable we left a profitable landscaping business to become flower farmers that may make sense to some of you and may not make sense to some of you as well we did and it was to serve a better purpose of our lifestyle because my little girl and my little boy can come with us my wife can work beside of me and once i get this established we can hire other people not only does it take money but it takes sacrifice what does it take we don't have a lot of things we don't have internet at home we don't have tv at home we uh we don't have car payments we don't have a lot of things so that we're able to do this and live this lifestyle i've truly learned that simple is better my wife is able to stay home with our little girl and our little boy to be able to provide for them and to have full attention on them it's not worth having that extra two hundred dollars a week after taxes and after sending them to daycare and all of those things i'd rather have her at home that that two hundred dollars goes to my kids it gives them a better home life when they get a little bit older they can come out with me we can all do this as a family and that's what i'm really hopeful for in the meantime while i was doing my little spill of talking i cut all these flowers here so far but i'll have this wagon filled up if not twice today i've got the first bucket cut in the comments below let me know how you store yours uh before you take them to the market to the wholesaler or to your csa's this right now is going to go to the reefer we're going to put them in the back of the car to take them into town so there's a few process and steps along the way we have a reefer right over there but it's actually broken down at the moment all right for now we're going to put them in here flowers are handled so many times during the day it's the time when you have to go through and disbud them and break the side shoots off it's the time when you have to go through and fertilize or pick off any of the bad insects that are on them then you have to cut them then you have to handle them then we have to go and take these to bunch them into bunches of five from that point we have to put them in buckets and sort them through and then put them on the van and then in the reefer and then from there we have to take them and deliver them and from that point we have to unload them and then wherever they go from there so they're handled so many times just by the farmer we're loaded up and we got them all bunched now almost by color coordination and then when we get to the van we can put them more into uh separate buckets because you have more surface area there this will be one load uh here we need to get some water jugs put those in here so we always have water for our buckets it's been raining and we usually pump out of the creek which helps us because we usually pump for irrigation out of the creek and also get our water that we need to put in our buckets and then we put sodium chloride tablets inside of there for the bacteria all right we have them in sections assorted we have them in here you got a flowers back there but this entire thing will be full by tomorrow morning for the reefer up top nothing special just an insulated reefer straight van does it look like i need any friends with me it's crammed in here i'm going to take these home these are for can't even see these are for the market tomorrow there's all my filler i've got some focal flowers focal flowers down there it's getting really hot so i'm going to go home and cut some more focal flowers these were all cut today i was cutting the goldenrod on the side of the road these were cut this morning those were all cut this morning as well i'm going to put these inside they've been in the shade but they do need to get inside to some cooler weather and they will be ready for bouquets later and up on top the hill behind me i need to cut some more later tonight and i'm going to go get some produce right now to take with me to the farmer's market at this point are you still wondering what it takes to be a flower farmer it's constant movement constant work especially if you're one person trying to get everything done and miranda helps me in the afternoons and my mentor was with me this morning and look i still i've really slacked off up here you've got dahlias to cut adgeratum to cut zinnias to cut and i'll probably get two or three more buckets out of there this afternoon we made it here to the farm now i need to load up some cabbage corn maybe some beets go down the road and get those but i'm here and i'm going to get some ice while i'm here too for tomorrow at the market there's a lot that goes into it that's for sure i finally got everything that i needed it's in the back here i've got three and a half bags of corn one bag of good cabbage and one bag of split cabbage for me and then i'm going to go pick some beets but they didn't have anything here and it took me a while i'm all sweating i actually went and cut my own corn out of the field hopefully it'll do good the market tomorrow we'll see when we get there it never ends it's 3 40 now and what i started this video at probably six o'clock or something i've already worked a full day now to keep working another full day well we finally made it home after 10 hours later yes i've already been here once but to drop off the flowers and i'll start cutting on that but one thing i would like to speak on is the produce that i have one reason i take it to the market with me is just to pull people's attention in and to have a couple different varieties of things because somebody doesn't always want flowers and i'm there to try to make it a full-time job so right now that's what's working for us and that's what i'm trying everything is not set in stone and i'm just uh trying the uh the farmer's market this year to see how that does and it's been profitable ever since but not like we would want it uh so that's why we feel like wholesaling is where we want to lean more towards or a csa and just have farmer's markets on the side it's now been 12 hours and on the life of a flower farmer we're getting ready for the farmer's market see she knows exactly what we're doing but the the flexibility here is look who's right beside of me that's the the biggest perk of this job right the idea is we're going to try to sell these bouquets for 20 a piece after we get the finished product i'll show you what it looks like but miranda and i after the babies go to bed we'll uh go ahead and put these together tired as can be now i have to pack the car i got the two tables in there i have those folded up have every all the seats folded down and most of the time it is a tight pack and a tight squeeze and i don't want to jam the flowers in there so we're going to put the the produce in first 7 30 now still haven't got any of the flowers made to go into the car i'm currently working on trying to spray because miranda said she had seen some bugs on the tomatoes and i also have to spray the flowers well for the ones that are new to the channel we do not use conventional sprays we use organics on our garden 180 here on our garden and then also on our flowers right now miranda has put out diatomaceous earth on the garden i do sometimes on the flowers if it's really needed but at this point tonight i'm just going to use neem oil and fish emulsion all right got the backpack sprayer on this is organic spray so i guess if you wanted to put it in your coffee i guess you could i don't think it would taste very well almost eight o'clock now i'm walking through the dahlias and spraying them real quick just giving them a good soak down i don't think you can really give too much on this i spray the dahlias at least once a week if it's warm and hasn't been raining but if it's raining i spray after every rain finished with that now count the women i need to go to the studies before you do that this is our new and improved we have put it in the craft paper we were just selling it with no craft paper but it looks better inside of the buckets so we think you've seen the time it's an earlier night i still have to go to town again tonight i have to get some table cloths for the tables tomorrow you can barely see me i wanted to be quiet getting out of the house this morning because everybody's sleeping it's six o'clock i got home about 11 41 last night maybe a little bit earlier than 11 41 11 30 and that was my day i need to pack the car up and head out let's go make some money today i have one seat open for a special person my grandma decided she wanted me to go with me today so i'm going to pick her up we finally made it here to the market yesterday we worked 18 hours and you can see that by the video previous that this is what it took to get it here and to finish the wholesale orders to go to charlotte and now it's time to sell it okay we have an update on the market we're almost out of our corn we brought how much i bring i brought 200 pounds of corn with me just to get people around looking we're almost out of cabbage we've got about a half a bag left and then the beets is that all the beets left oh well i guess we still have some beets left but we've sold six bouquets today it's a little slower of a day we'll try to maybe send these over to the florist and to see if they're interested in looking at them after we finish up the market here it's a series of events it just keeps going and going and going we still have flowers left right here behind us and we are at the florist in the back side and we're going to see if they want them i don't like to go home with any flowers i'm going to go in here in a sec well we hit one last stop i was dropping off my grandma here at her house i do have a little bit left of the flowers that's hasn't been pretty normal um in the past couple weeks but then again labor day is right around the corner and we have a big flea market in the area that we live in and so maybe everybody's down that way i'm not exactly sure but it's now 216 the next day from the start of this video and that just goes to show you how much goes into the flower farming aspect it is so much so you really have to figure out what is best for you in the flower world is it wholesaling is it the market the farmer's market or something else i'm sitting in line now at the traffic light we have to go home and unload this everything here put the car seats back in and the stroller back in to make just a few hundred extra dollars is it really worth all of this before next spring to make sure this is something we really want to do is the farmer's markets there's nothing wrong with the farmer's markets but the only good one around here that i didn't clarify is probably 45 minutes where i have found to be most profitable is selling to be wholesaling and maybe some csa work the way that i make this a full-time job and make full-time money is working all the time if that's something you're interested in you definitely can do it in the first year you will just have to sacrifice time like at the beginning of the video i said determination we are a one income household and it it is possible with lots of sacrifice make sure you leave a thumbs up for us ask us a question and keep the comments rolling because that's what keeps our channel possible so we really appreciate it we'll see on the next one