A refrigerated room at Flora Fresh keeps bouquets fresh ahead of Valentine’s Day. After storms destroyed and delayed crops in Southern California, the wholesaler imported more flowers this year.
Photo/Caleb Hampton
February 14, 2024 - By Caleb Hampton - The stars are aligned for a good Valentine’s Day for the floral sector. With the holiday falling on a Wednesday and clear skies forecast for most regions in the U.S., flower retailers were preparing for a busy Feb. 14.
“This is going to be a strong holiday,” Camron King, CEO and ambassador for Certified American Grown, an organization that advocates for U.S. cut flower farmers, said last week. “Because it is a midweek holiday, a lot of folks send their loved ones flowers to celebrate versus maybe going out of town for the weekend.”
Two separate consumer data analyses projected record Valentine’s Day flower sales this year. They were conducted by the market research firm Prince & Prince Inc. and the data analytics platform Statista.
“We’re always busy before Valentine’s Day,” said Sherry Sanbo, owner of Golden State Floral, a wholesale florist in Yolo County. Last week, employees there trimmed stems and assembled bouquets for stores across the region.
The holiday typically trails only Mother’s Day in flower sales. To get all her orders filled, Sanbo said she doubled her workforce during the two weeks preceding Valentine’s Day. “Everybody is working real hard,” she said.
For California cut flower farmers, the winter holiday brought a welcome boost in demand alongside renewed frustration.
For two years running, dark skies and stormy weather have impacted flower crops grown in the state for Valentine’s Day. A powerful storm that swept through Southern California last week ruined some field-grown flowers and prevented harvest crews from picking crops meant for Valentine’s Day.
“We had multiple days of rain leading into the holiday, which limited the opportunities we may have had,” said Michael Mellano, CEO of Mellano & Co., which grows flowers in San Diego County and supplies wholesalers across the country. “There’s some revenue loss for us and some loss in paychecks for employees who would normally be harvesting that crop.”
Greg Staby, buyer for Flora Fresh Inc., an employee-owned wholesale florist in Sacramento County, said farmers the company sources from reported flooded fields and crop losses in Ventura County. “When it’s cold and wet, that doesn’t really help a lot of the stuff in fields,” he said.
Fields of snapdragons, lilies, green mist and Queen Anne’s lace were flooded or damaged by wind. “Some of the products from Southern California are very difficult to get because of the storms,” Sanbo said.
Flowers grown indoors have also suffered this winter. Rene Van Wingerden, owner of Ocean Breeze in Santa Barbara County, said dark skies hampered the growth of Oriental lilies and Gerbera daisies in his greenhouses.
“Not seeing the sun slows down the crop,” Van Wingerden said. Despite controlling the greenhouse temperature, production typically declines by around 30% in the winter due to the lack of sunlight. It dropped off even steeper this year, he said.
Van Wingerden added that it is more expensive to grow flowers in the winter because of the energy required to heat greenhouses. “We actually don’t like Valentine’s Day,” he said. “Everything costs more, and the finished product is less. You add those up and there’s nothing left.”
With limited supplies from California, wholesalers have filled the void with imports, primarily from South America. “As much as I love supporting California, I have to fill this place with flowers,” Staby said, “and I’ve got to get them somewhere.”
Losing crops meant for the Valentine’s Day market is a blow for California farmers already struggling to maintain profit margins as input costs rise and imports undercut prices. Labor, fuel and materials have become especially expensive. But Van Wingerden said, “If I raise my price, they’ll go to imports.”
U.S. cut flower farmers have struggled to compete with imports for years. In 1991, the U.S. Congress eliminated tariffs on agricultural products from four South American nations in an effort to incentivize legitimate jobs outside coca production in countries plagued by the drug trade.
Since then, the cut flower sector in Ecuador and Colombia has flourished, and many flower farms in California have scaled down their operations or gone out of business. “The flower industry got decimated,” Van Wingerden said. About 80% of flowers sold in the U.S. are now imported.
The dominance of imports is especially evident on Valentine’s Day. Roses, symbols of love and devotion because of the high price once paid for a single stem, were historically supplied to U.S. markets by domestic farmers, mainly in California.
They are now almost exclusively imported from Ecuador and Colombia. Van Wingerden, who has grown flowers for half a century, planted his last rose more than 20 years ago.
To stay in business, “you keep changing, you keep modernizing, you keep going after a market that will at least pay something for your product,” Van Wingerden said. Those changes include “looking for varieties that do not take as much energy to grow and that produce more,” he said, as well as specialty varieties that are too delicate to travel from South America to U.S. markets.
California growers have largely shifted to growing greenery and filler flowers, “the supporting cast,” Mellano said, for bouquets centered around roses or carnations.
Mellano has also changed his operations. “We definitely aren’t growing the number of flowers that we used to grow,” he said. Previously, Mellano & Co. grew more than 30 different varieties. Today, “we’re in the neighborhood of 10 or 15, and we’re probably going to whittle that down to 10 or less,” he said.
Despite the challenges California cut flower farmers face and the additional obstacles leading into Valentine’s Day, “overall, the holiday was and will continue to be successful,” Mellano said.
Last week, he said he was hoping for a break in the rain a few days before Feb. 14, to get into the fields and harvest flowers for shoppers in Southern California.
“It probably isn’t too late for the local market,” he said.
(Caleb Hampton is an assistant editor of Ag Alert. He may be contacted at champton@cfbf.com.)
The California Farm Bureau works to protect family farms and ranches on behalf of nearly 29,000 members statewide and as part of a nationwide network of 5.3 million Farm Bureau members.
Source: CA. Farm Bureau
