Image by Stephen Marc from Pixabay
April 13, 2022 - By Kevin Hecteman - Are these bloom times again for Easter lilies? Sales of the iconic spring flower are up again, growers and wholesalers report, but below pre-pandemic levels.
"The pandemic two years ago pretty much wiped out 70% of the sales of lilies that were being grown in the greenhouse to sell for Easter two years ago," said Rob Miller, who grows Easter lilies in the Del Norte County town of Smith River. "The demand for plants from the greenhouse to the retail stores has never recovered fully."
The reasons, Miller said, are that buyers are afraid to overstock their stores—as with Christmas trees, Easter lilies lose their market value the day after the holiday—and that younger generations are not as religiously observant as their elders.
"This Easter, there basically is not a big increase in the orders for product from greenhouses to the stores, even though last year the stores cleaned out of their product very well," Miller said. "They sold the product well but did not place much in the way of additional orders for plants for this coming Easter."
The lower demand from greenhouses, he added, has led to an oversupply of bulbs, many of which never got the chance to bloom as a result.
"When you either dump or plow down crop that's unsalable, that's expensive," Miller said.
Allan Nishita, a Sacramento flower wholesaler, said "people are wanting them now" after COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders wiped out the 2020 season.
"In 2020, we had Easter lilies pre-booked with our supplier, and there was no business" with everything closed, Nishita said. "We didn't know what to expect for '21, so we just duplicated what we purchased in '20, and pretty much sold out. This year, we probably had to increase the purchases 20% to 25% from what we bought in '21." A good deal of the demand is from churches, he noted.
This year's lilies have been a long time coming, as is usual for the crop that can only be grown in far northwestern California and southwestern Oregon.
"The production time to grow a bulb that was harvested and packaged and shipped last October is roughly three-plus years," said Miller, who's also president of the Del Norte County Farm Bureau. "The pipeline, even though there was terrible disruption in consumption two years ago, was full. There has been a significant surplus of bulbs that have not been shipped the last couple of years."
Firm orders for bulbs won't be in until late September and early October, right before harvest, Miller said.
"We have no ability right now to do anything other than the best cultural practices from now till harvest," Miller said. "We'll know at harvest, or maybe at the latest early December, for sure how many bulbs we're going to sell."
Easter lily blooming needs to be timed for the holiday, and this one is a movable feast. The first full moon after the vernal equinox determines the date, with Easter being the first Sunday after that moon. Miller noted that even so, the timing of bulb shipments doesn't change—all the work is done in the greenhouses afterward.
"What changes is forcing temperatures in the greenhouses that can push the crop along quicker with higher temperature, or push the crop along slower with lower temperatures," Miller said.
All told, Miller said, what did go to the greenhouses is likely to find a home for the holiday.
"I believe the demand has been good, and the product will sell out of the greenhouses," Miller said.
(Kevin Hecteman is an assistant editor of Ag Alert. He may be contacted at khecteman@cfbf.com.)
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The California Farm Bureau Federation works to protect family farms and ranches on behalf of nearly 32,000 members statewide and as part of a nationwide network of more than 5.5 million Farm Bureau members.
Source: Reprinted with permission CFBF
