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Commercial greenhouse growers have new lighting technologies top of mind.

This year’s State of Lighting Report shows more than two-thirds of growers surveyed plan to upgrade or invest in new lighting systems over the next three years.

Growers rely on supplemental lighting for a multitude of reasons, chief among them being additional lighting during periods of low light (33%) and day length extension (30%). Currently, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are the top choice among this group with 79% reporting usage, while high-pressure sodium (HPS) (50%) and fluorescent (29%) fixtures round out the top three.

We reached out to three growers planning to make a significant investment in either upgrading or installing new supplemental lighting in the greenhouse to see what’s driving their decisions.

Training tomorrow’s grower

The Abilities Connection (TAC) operates a 3,000-square-foot greenhouse an hour southeast of Columbus, Ohio. TAC Farms is a member of the Growing Opportunities Partnership, a coalition of 10 hydroponic greenhouses nationwide whose primary focus is vocational rehabilitation for adults with developmental disabilities.

Their goal is to teach a well-rounded horticultural skillset that positions graduates for job placement in greenhouses throughout Central Ohio.

Currently, the operation plants and harvests lettuce crops on a six-week production cycle. TAC uses three forms of supplemental lighting in the greenhouse — LEDs, HPS and fluorescent — to provide the trainees with as well-rounded a growing experience as possible.

The group applied for 14 different grants over the past year, hoping to secure funds to expand the growing operation to “either double the size of the existing hydroponic arrangement, expand indoors in about the same footprint using a dry fog system or add two 40-foot containerized hydroponic units,” says Lou Driever, who coordinates hydroponic operations.

“The simplest way to expand production is increasing the number of grow sites,” Driever says. “We can alternatively increase production by increasing the growth rate or harvestable mass of the produce. With the future expansion, I believe we will go all red/blue LED. As part of the learning curve, we will be specifying the frequencies to ensure those are optimal for leafy greens.”

Driever says he’s intrigued by recent developments in pulsating light arrays designed to maximize photosynthesis in the farm’s indoor lettuce crops, although the operation’s size means that not all technologies will “pencil out” in terms of ROI.

Still, a recent grant-funded investment in new red/blue spectrum LEDs in one of TAC Farm’s indoor grow rooms left a good impression on Driever. The addition quickly boosted yields by 50% in a space that had been plagued by shadows and uneven coverage. That one did end up penciling out, after all.

“We are eager to act as a testbed for lighting applications,” he says. “To that end, we can work with vendors on their beta testing, identifying any potential glitches that may arise before they spool up to field them en masse.”

All signs point to staying put

Dave Demarey grows off-season, flavor-bursting indeterminate tomatoes in a 5,000 square foot greenhouse on the outskirts of Westhampton, Massachusetts.

In New England greenhouse production, supplemental lighting is “the name of the game,” he says, noting that his current setup deploys double-ended High-Pressure Sodium (HPS) fixtures.

“I just finished an expansion [with HPS] and now we’re looking at extending it into another building, where we’ll probably have to lower the ceilings a little bit first,” Demarey says. “I’m really struggling right now on whether to go to LEDs or stay with the HPS.”

The issue, the grower says, is a bit of a conundrum. In the area he wants to expand lighting into, the fixture mounting height is a bit higher than recommended. He could drop the ceiling height, or he could select a light powerful enough to penetrate down into the canopy and somewhat limit extensive vertical stretch. After all, in greenhouse tomatoes you do want some stretch.

“My process is actually quite a bit more research-based than that,” Demarey says when asked if he will rely on word-of-mouth when making his lighting buy. “I’ll go through as much of the research that’s out there that I can get my hands on, and then I’ll add in some of my own direct experience.”

When it comes to his own variety of indeterminate tomatoes specifically, he has learned that the end of season differences when comparing the two types of lighting are minimal.

He does say that LEDs in fact have a slight (10% or less) yield advantage over the HPS he is using currently, but “the newer HPS are very broad spectrum, so their relative efficiency is really high.” Demarey’s HPS fixtures also put off a slightly greater measure of heat, a crucial ancillary benefit in the brutal New England winters, when those extra three degrees of heat — which Demarey measures and tracks — on average make a major difference on his heating bill.

“Look, I think a lot of these new LEDs are really great, but I think the big thing that stops everyone going whole hog into the LED market is the up-front investment cost,” Demarey says. “I can put together a nice HPS setup for my greenhouse for about 22 cents a watt. Something similar but with LEDs would be $1 per watt, minimum.

Doing due diligence

Snethen Farms in Montrose, Missouri, plans to expand beyond its current high tunnel and fluorescent tube lighting setup in the next 12-18 months with a high tech, climate-controlled greenhouse, as well as some hydroponic growing systems and more high tunnels.

For his part, owner-operator Michael Snethen is tiring of the constant adjustments needed to make sure his fluorescent tube fixtures remain directly above the canopy of his vegetable transplants.

Any slip-up and young seedlings emerge from spring propagation too leggy and not as attractive to the scrutinizing buyers of commercial starter stock.

“My main agenda is to come up with better grow lights to propagate my vegetable transplants,” the grower says. “I also want to supplement a few early tomatoes and peppers with a few hours of lighting until the day length is sufficient.”

Up to the present, the initial cost of investment has discouraged Snethen — a newer indoor produce grower — from pulling the trigger on some new LED or HPS fixtures.

“I don’t really know where to start (with supplemental lighting),” Snethen says. “I’ll be doing a considerable amount of research this fall and into the winter.”

That process will entail Snethen leaning heavily on word-of-mouth referrals from other growers, as well as a bit of social media and online product review sleuthing.

“The advice of fellow growers is almost exclusively the best,” he says, adding that he believes a grower subsidy program for supplemental lighting would “really give it a boost.”

All the rage in the ‘70s, houseplants fell out of favor in the subsequent decades. But they’re back with a vengeance. In the past three years, houseplant sales have grown by 50%, according to the National Gardening Association.

Some plants have become status symbols for Instagram “Plantfluencers,” driving their price tag into the three digit-range. The thrill of exclusivity motivates these social-media savvy plant parents to splurge on a pink princess philodendron or variegated monstera. Being able to post a “shelfie” of a rare find on social media is a powerful pull for younger millennials and Generation Z.

“The demand for houseplants has been steadily increasing over the last few years as plants have become cool again, thanks to social platforms like Instagram and YouTube,” says Maggie Bridge, manager of sales and marketing for Sam Bridge Nursery & Greenhouses.

At Sam Bridge, a Greenwich, Connecticut, institution and No. 37 on Garden Center magazine’s Top 100 list, demand has surged from both new and existing customers. Though the trend is a few years old, it noticeably ticked up a notch during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“During quarantine, there was definitely a push to green up personal spaces whether inside or out,” Bridge says. “For us, quarantine kicked in during the tail end of winter and we continued to have cold weather through May, which helped the houseplant trend.”

Jennifer Rolo handles all the buying for Weston Nurseries’ 300-acre garden center in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. She has seen a substantial increase in the demand for houseplants and she believes the trend is being driven by new customers. The new customers are part of a younger generation, she says, mostly living in apartments, and they’re buying plants for their indoor living spaces.

The opportunities for IGCs don’t end with the houseplant sales, though. Rolo says there has been a corresponding increase in sales in indoor accent pottery that correlates with the houseplant boom. Those first-time home buyers and even apartment-dwellers want to put a pot on their front step or patio.

Where the rare plants are hiding

Rolo relies on her staff of 20-somethings in the greenhouse department to keep up with houseplant trends.

“They certainly keep me on my toes and they’re very much into houseplants,” she says. “I also take requests from them on what they find cool and interesting.”

Many of her orders are direct from Florida. She also uses her connections, from local contacts to brokers that help her find some of the more unusual, unique items that a big grower wouldn’t necessarily stock.

“I’m a plant geek myself,” she says. “I do my homework; I source vendors and go to other garden centers when I have time and I do look at their vendor tags on their pots, because that helps.”

Bridge also sources a lot of houseplants from Florida and credits a longstanding relationship with a broker who always seems to help them find what they want. Later in the season, when filling a truck becomes more difficult, the IGC turns to local sources. Bridge says there are some great places to find rare houseplants on Long Island and a few come out of Canada as well.

Sam Bridge tends to plan orders based of what sells best, though finding a grower that has some of the most popular Instagram plants in stock is like finding a $100 bill on the sidewalk.

“Anything new or cool we come across in the social world definitely makes it on the wish list — whether it’s actually available is another story,” she says.

She’s looking into sourcing exciting new plants from California, but shipping coast to coast is an expensive proposition.

“We’ve been making it work with what’s available, mixing up selections and so far the results have been great,” she says.

She says the Connecticut IGC has even had success adding houseplants they’d usually consider basic, like some palms and cordylines, if they’ve been out of the limelight for a season or two.

How to price rarity

Dr. Bridget Behe, professor of horticultural marketing at Michigan State University, says retail pricing for rare plants complies with the law of supply and demand. If you only have two or three of a particular plant in your inventory, you only need a couple of buyers to sell out.

“Pick a number that you think is obscenely high, not thousands of dollars, but you need to test the waters,” she says. “Even the markups of three, five, 10, 50 times the price, these rules don’t really apply when you’ve got something novel and unique.”

If the plant sits for a few weeks, you can always bring the price down, Behe says. A decent point-of-sale system will let you change prices at the drop of a hat, without the appearance of putting it on sale. She urges IGCs to let a rare plant’s scarcity and popularity work for them and not to let it slip away too quickly.

“Are you the only one that has that plant? Well, you’ve got an opportunity to really make some money from somebody who really badly wants that plant,” she says. “Don’t be afraid to put what you would consider to be an extraordinarily high price on that and see what happens. But the only way you’ll know is to try it. And if you go in too low and it sells the next day, I think you’ve really lost an opportunity to make a profit.”

At Weston Nurseries, Rolo audits the competition before pricing. There are a lot of IGCs in Massachusetts as well as the big-box stores, and she shops around to see where they stand. But a hard-to-acquire plant will cost more.

“If it is a rare or unusual specimen or a difficult plant to get, we do charge more,” she says. “We price what we feel that it’s worth and being plant geeks and experts, I think that we come up with a good middle ground of what we might pay for it.”

At Sam Bridge, pricing is usually based off what they pay for the material. But if a plant arrives looking incredible and the IGC staff thinks they can get more for it, it will get a bump.

“Formulas are great on paper, but nothing can compare to double-checking that material in person and asking yourself if that calculated price makes sense,” Bridge says.

Rolo sees the houseplant boom as an opportunity for IGCs to differentiate themselves from the big-box competition, which rarely stocks any plants that could be categorized as rare or unusual — certainly nothing that would inspire envy on Instagram or among the 365,000 members of the Reddit houseplants community.

“You have your bread and your butter and your milk at box stores,” she says. “But at the garden centers you have all the other goodies.”

IGCs can be the destination for the savvy shoppers who want the hot plant they can’t find anywhere else — and are willing to pay a premium for it. A plant specialist who can track down a rare item builds trust and customer loyalty.

“The trust is a big selling point because even if our price may be slightly higher for an item like bread, our customers still will come back to us and buy that bread because they trust that they’re going to be successful and they can get the guidance,” Rolo says. “They can come back to us and say, ‘How come this didn’t work?’ versus not having that personal connection with anybody in the box stores.”

The opportunity is there for IGCs to seize. Because of the quarantines, more people are turning to gardening and many IGCs have had a huge spring. Planters and raised beds have been incredibly popular at Sam Bridge and soil has been next to impossible to keep in stock. Maggie Bridge says the IGC has shortages that won’t be filled until the fall or even next year.

“With more and more people staying home than ever before, every DIY project is now within reach,” she says. “People want to get their hands dirty whether it’s inside or out and our industry has a golden opportunity. We finally have the audience we’ve been waiting for so it’s up to us to show them how cool plants are.”

Behe concurs and underscores the opportunity for IGCs to maximize their profits on these hot items.

“We need to be brave,” Behe says. “We need to be thinking about the potential profitability for that plant. The tendency is to underestimate the value of the plant. If consumers were rational, economists would rule the world, but people are not rational and some people will pay what you might consider to be an exorbitant price for a plant.”

Let’s face it: Raising prices and margins is often met with emotional resistance.

Yet, with the kind of year we’ve had so far, it seems prudent to take a fresh look at pricing strategies and reevaluate how consumers view and define premium plants and products. Are you missing out on hard-earned margin?

There is no doubt that in 2020, the impact of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic is probably going to mean big changes to financial projections, consumer pricing perception and pricing strategies. The U.S. economy saw a whopping 32%+ drop as of the end of July and a 5% drop in GDP.

Change is inevitable for us all.

It is change, though, that is often the sticking point for growers and garden center retailers alike. Let’s take a look at your current plant availabilities, then ask yourself:

• Are you hanging on to a dated production list of offerings? Are you just growing what you’ve always grown, because that is what is easy and comfortable?
• Are you resistant to growing high-price/high-margin specialty crops because you don’t want to pay a premium price for the seeds or cuttings?
• Or, has your predominantly landscaper customer base forced you to focus on tight margin commodity color?

As a retail buyer, I’m forced to buy based on price if most of my area growers offer essentially the same crops and size. Putting you, the grower, in a race to the bottom for low price customers.

But, if you have specialty items and offer premium crops — plants I know my retail customers will happily pay a higher price for — you will garner much more of my overall business and bigger average sales. I also win because I get to charge higher margins for premium plants and differentiate my offerings to my customers. Not to mention get more of what I need from fewer vendors.

Often, there is a perception that your garden center or landscaper buyers will not pay your higher price for a specialty or premium crop. But have you asked? As retail consumers and homeowners turned to plants and gardening during shutdowns, transitioning to working (and schooling) from home, and staycations, garden centers on average saw a big upswing in sales. The value of flowers, food, and houseplants was elevated for many existing gardeners.

We also gained many new customers who started experimenting for the first time with both outdoor and indoor gardening. The perceived value of many types of plants and gardening products is evolving upwards.

If you doubt this evolution, please take a deep dive into the world of houseplants.

The demand has gotten so high for many tropicals that some savvy retail growers have resorted to high priced auctions. The amount that new plant parents are willing to pay for individual specimens is quite shocking. Realize, this is how many of our up and coming gardeners are being trained to value plants. They love the unusual and are willing to pay a pretty penny for premium plants.

The goal of a premium pricing strategy is higher profit margins, competition pressure and improving overall brand value. Premium products may be new plant introductions, rare varieties, have limited availability, a special color, or they can even be bigger (or smaller) in size.

Premium does not always have to mean new. Big changes in the economy and emotional priorities of our customers can turn a once seemingly ubiquitous product into a high-demand, high-margin item.

The run on seeds this spring is a great example. Traditionally a low-price commodity item for gardeners, seeds transformed — overnight — into a high-demand premium product due to consumer urgency and supply.

Now is a good time to evaluate your offerings to see where you can command better margins.

Many of you were forced to change your product offerings this spring due to shutdowns and restrictions on the types of plants you could sell and transport.

If you already focused on edible transplants and herbs, you may have been able to keep your production lines moving better than ornamental-only growers. You might have even had a bigger spring than usual. What may have once been considered commodity staples (i.e. tomato transplants) suddenly became high-demand, premium crops. There is no need to let that new value perception fade post-COVID-19.

Now, keep in mind that growers and garden centers often see a sales slowdown post-recession. Traditionally, after the economy starts to shift back into a positive gear, homeowners tend to reinvest in big ticket items and cars. They usually stop spending as much on landscape plants.

Truth be told, I have no idea whether that trend will play out the same way during this more unusual recession. But it’s worth keeping in mind.

It is quite possible that consumers will be willing to pay even less for standard commodity crops, but be willing to pay even more for premium crops that became high demand during the shutdowns. However their brains were trained, or retrained, during this stressful time remains to be fully understood.

As we continue to adjust to whatever our new normal will be economically, now is a good time to evaluate your offerings to see where you can command better margins and market higher value plants. Be it with crops you already grow, or new ones that you should add.

Plantpeddler releases 2020 Variety Day results

Plantpeddler held its annual Variety Day, Friday Sept. 7, along with celebrating the 40th anniversary of the company. The trials were held in a new site completed in the Spring of 2020, and represents an investment in grower success by “Testing the Best in the Midwest.”

Growers, breeders, brokers and retailers spent the day evaluating the Trial Gardens, attending seminars by industry professionals, and touring the greenhouses. Presenters included: Broch Martindale, Corteva; Elizabeth Burdett, Selecta; Mike Faber and Ivan Izzo, BFG; Nathan Sell, Dümmen Orange; and Dr. Christopher Currey, Iowa State University. Participants had the opportunity to vote on their top three varieties.

Fall prep in the nursery

Winter may be months away, but there is still much to do. Here are several steps to take before the snow flies to ensure your business stays strong through the colder months.

Decide what to toss.

Fall is the time to throw away inferior plants that you don’t have much chance of selling. Sure, you may be optimistic, but why commit overwintering resources to a plant that is already behind the curve?

Margery Daughtrey, senior extension associate with the Long Island Horticultural Research & Extension Center, says late fall is a good time to make those hard decisions.

“If it’s really undersized and therefore you might assume its root health is poor, it’s better to discard it,” she says. “It won’t grow better next year, it will continue to be a bad plant.

MANTS shifting from in-person show to alternate platform for 2021

Due to COVID-19 concerns, ongoing restrictions on large indoor gatherings and unforeseen unavailability at the Baltimore Convention Center, The Mid-Atlantic Nursery Trade Show (MANTS) announced on Aug. 4 that the 2021 show, initially scheduled for Jan. 6-8, is unable to take place as an in-person event. MANTS organizers are, instead, working to provide an online platform where exhibitors and attendees can conduct business.