Jenny (00:28)
today, I'm sitting down with Anna Jane Cosson, who is the owner of Little State Flower Company in Tiverton, Rhode Island. She is running a five acre specialty cut flower farm that focuses on sustainable, environmentally friendly growing practices and an effort to create local healthy options for florists and flower lovers in and around the Rhode Island area. Anna Jane is super unique because she has been growing cut flowers
18 years and has owned her own business for 10 years. She grows a huge variety of crops year round and sells cut flowers for about 11 months out of the year. And I love this conversation with her because her farm is just so different than mine and she's doing it in such a fun and creative way. So I know you're going to love this conversation. Let's dive on
Jenny (01:17)
so Anna Jane, we're just talking about how challenging of a winter season you've been having. And you always amaze me because you seem to do so much stuff and you're growing year round right now. So I really want to talk to you about how you decided to come to this.
conclusion of basically selling flowers year round and how that's affected your Um, so the region I live in is quite, uh, we're in Rhode Island. It's the Northeastern United States and zone six B, but I think it just got changed to zone seven and it's coastal, it's salty air. So we're basically existing inside a microclimate.
And when you're on the Atlantic ocean, like we are, um, you know, and the coast is very rugged. There's lots of nooks and crannies everywhere going up and down the coast. So that creates like little pockets of different kinds of climates and things like that. So our farm. I have several properties and I own one and I lease other properties. And that really does create kind of an environment where you're able to push the limits and the boundaries of your season pretty well.
And there are a lot of flowers that love to grow quite cool. And so we're not that breezing here. You know, it might get down into the twenties, but that's pretty much it. It doesn't really go much colder than that that much. And if it does, it's short lived. So we don't live in like negative, you know, in like five degrees for like weeks on end. That's not us. We're usually in the twenties at the coldest. And then usually it's in the thirties. So that's a really, really good.
window for crops like anemones and tulips. Like those crops are quite happy growing in that bracket of temps. And the reason why I ended up kind of growing all the way through the year is that actually started from the farm and flora collective, which I don't know if you remember that. That was my, I have another business called the farm and flora collective, which was a leasing of a greenhouse, a garden center.
a couple towns over with my friend Jill from Wild Season Floral. She's a florist, a very well known florist. She used to own Studio 2. And my other girlfriend, Bridget Finn from Bridget Finn Fine Gardening. So the three of us joined forces and created another business called the Farm and Floor Collective so that we were able to lease this garden center on Aquidneck Island. And the reason why they wanted to do it, they actually...
there's very little space on Aquidneck Island for businesses and Bridget has a very successful gardening business and she had been actively looking for more space. So when this garden center opened up, she checked it out and was like, oh my gosh, there's a whole bunch of heated greenhouses here. There's an office, there's a retail space. Like it was like a full on awesome garden center. And so she and Jill were looking at it because Jill had been thinking about opening a flower shop and they were like, well, we don't need all these.
heated greenhouses, who do we know that would know what to do with these? And who might want to try? So they hit me up and I had just purchased the property I'm living on now and it was a junkyard and we had a long way to go to clean it out and everything on my, my farm was not a farm when I bought it. So I, at first I was like, Oh, you're not going to talk to me into this. There's just no way I got like enough on my plate.
But then I went and saw it and there was three huge heated greenhouses and an unheated greenhouse that was basically there. I had been interested in a while in wanting to keep, like I wanted to know how I could keep my employees on and support my employees better and not just be like, Oh, it's winter, you're laid off by, you know, like I, I had always been thinking about that and what could be done to try to keep them.
employed and on the payroll, you know, and you have to create the work, obviously. So this was, I, you know, my girl, Sarah, who was my farm manager at the time, I brought her there and I showed her the space and I told her what I said, you know, we could try this if you think like, what do you think? Like we could take the risk, we can put you on for the year round salary and we could try to build this winter growing program together here. I think there's a market.
You know, our farm, not only are we in a microcrime it area where it's easy to grow year round, not easy. Excuse me. Possible possible to grow year round. We also have a market here that is very wealthy. So the proximity to wealth is imperative for a successful flower farm, in my opinion. If you don't live among like a near the wealthy or amongst the wealthy, because you need people who have like $30 a week every single week to spend with you. And that's not everyone.
So I do believe that your proximity to wealth is going to affect how many flowers you're going to be able to sell consistently. If you know, if your farm isn't in near or up against a wealthy community like mine is, then you need to pack your flowers up and take it to somewhere where they can buy you buy your stuff like New York City or Boston or something like that. So I, that was one of the reasons why I thought perhaps we could go for this because we do have a pretty substantial following. There's a lot of people and.
The other thing is I'm, I tend to be quite competitive in general. And I thought there's no other, nobody else's, there's no one doing this. No, I don't know. I don't know anybody doing it. And also there's no one to help me and teach me how to do it. No one was doing it in my region. I had no one. I didn't know there was literally no one to ask to teach me how to do it. Did no one had any math? No one had any numbers. Nobody had any production results. I had no one. And I thought.
Okay. I've been farming for a long time. I have grown in crates before for people when I worked at other farms. And so I knew it was possible and the conditions made sense. Like, why wouldn't the anemones grow in crates? Like, why wouldn't the ranunculus? Like, why wouldn't they? Of course they will, you know, but you have to understand the fundamentals of what you're trying to do, which is you're putting them in a crate. That means they're not getting like the outside water, you know, the elements from outside. They don't just have endless.
supply from the soil, they only have that crate, that crate of soil. And so you do need to figure out your amendments and your feeding schedule and things like that. So we dove in and this was an opportunity, you know, to try something different and to push my creative boundaries and my creative limits and to see what, what they were like and what could be done. You know, there wasn't, I'm just a creative person. My background is in fine arts. And I think that I,
I like to reach, you know, and I like to, to see what could happen. Now when I teach, I do teach a workshop on this. Now I teach study session on heated, great growing. It's my most popular one by far. I've taught that one 17 times now. So that's almost 200 people have taken it with me and it's a super serious topic. When I start out, it's not fluff and cuteness. It's, it's, it's scary thing to try.
Yeah. So it's expensive. It's expensive. Uh, the results are unknown. The risk is high. Uh, the profit margins are slim. So if you want to try it, do your research and you also need to know that you have enough money. You have to have your farm doing well enough during the main season that you would have enough money to not only live on for the months that you're not producing, you don't have anything to sell, but that you have enough money to build into the different structure. Like you're going to have to buy pallets of soil.
and a whole other succession of corms and tubers and whatever it is you're going to grow. You know, like you're going to have to buy all that in, you're going have to run heat. And if it's not just you, you're going to have to pay someone to help you do it. And you're also forfeiting your winter rest. So I ended up going for it. It was just an opportunity that couldn't be passed up. Like the situation was good. The rent was affordable. I had two other.
business people with me to rely on to help with that. You know, I wasn't on my own. So our lease was only three years long. It's not like I was bound into this thing for 15 years or something. And we were in the middle of building our own farm out and I wanted to have heated crate growing here. So this actually created the opportunity for me to be able to take the risk and try a lot of different crops and do the math and watch the money.
without having to go build the whole thing for myself and then find out it didn't make money. You know, like if I was like, so, and it edited out anything that wasn't going to be worth my time. Cause I obviously don't have three huge heated greenhouses at my home farm. I have one. So who was going to make the cut was important to me, Lynn. I need, and I was able to sort that out in that format and I was able to figure out what did it really cost? Like.
How much energy does it use? You know, because there wasn't anybody to talk about it with me and literally no one. So I figured it out. Yeah. And I feel like I was actually just talking to someone else about innovation within the cut flower industry and how it seems like most of the innovation that is occurring is from individuals like yourself who are taking on all of this risk and basically just like experimenting the heck out of it.
And then hopefully sharing what you learn with everyone else, because it's not coming from like, there's no like industry standards about a lot of this stuff. And it's a really scary place to be and your position. I mean, there's no industry standard because everybody's farms are so different and everyone's goals and requirements are so different from each other. I think the thing about flower farming.
that separates us from just let's call, let's just say like standard vegetable farming is that the goals within the farm are very, very different. And it's such diversified growing that, you know, you grow cucumbers the way you grow cucumbers, you grow carrots the way you grow carrots. There isn't a lot of exploration to be done in that concept, you know, and the market doesn't want the weird cucumber.
You know, like they want their slicer, but they'll buy the weird flowers, you know, and they'll buy the weird stuff in the off season. Like they will, but they're not going to do that with cucumbers. They want their slicers, you know, like they don't want the weird yellow spiky one. They're just like, where's the slicer? You know? So I do think that our industry, you know, when the conditions are right, which I think my conditions were right.
for experimentation where you can charge enough retail to afford to pay your employees well and keep them on year round. And then push your boundaries of the season because you know you've got the clients to pay. So because that's the other thing. The flowers in winter are very expensive. Yeah, and you know, because I'm robbing anybody, it's because that's what it costs to do it.
And I think that's, I'm really glad that you're talking about that because I see a lot of growers, you know, we all get like this shiny object syndrome and they're like, oh, so and so is forcing winter tulips or growing winter flowers. Like I'm going to do that without sitting down and doing the thought process that you did where you had a market for it in an area that was able to pay for the product. You already sort of had an established market that you could market these flowers to.
And I'm guessing that if you didn't have that type of market in the place that you're at, like if you were where I am and sort of like rural -ish New York, like would you have still taken on that project, do you think? Probably not because I think the other issue, for instance, not this past weekend, but the weekend prior, it was way, way too cold to sell flowers. No matter what format I was in, I couldn't even get them from.
the processing area to the car without them freezing. Oh, geez. Yeah. So that's that these are issues. Yeah, these are issues. These are the things that come up, you know what I mean? And then you have to figure out like, what are you going to do about it? You know, so, um, no, I actually don't think that I don't know the garden center farm and flora collective was such a unique opportunity and so weird.
know, I still don't know anybody else that's ever done anything like that, you know, I mean, it was like a whole flex in a couple of other different ways to not only in pushing the boundaries of what we were able to do creatively with flower farming, but also just from a business standpoint, you know, like, we had to put our big girl pants on and like get lawyers and stuff, you know, so because
You can destroy your friendships. You can destroy your business. You have to destroy your reputation. Like there's other people involved in that situation and you need to be very careful. Right. So are you still doing that or is that project? Has that come to a close? Uh, yeah, it's, uh, this past season was our first season, like completely not in the farm and floor collective. Our lease was three years. So.
And they didn't want to, we just didn't renew our lease. That's all. It was like, there was like literally no drama with that. It was other than just the lease ended and everybody, you know, I would say what I usually describe the farm and floor collective as is it wasn't instead of, it was in addition to what I was already doing, you know, so without it, it wasn't like I didn't still have my entire farm functioning like normal. You know, I did. We were really only using it.
It's like I added a whole other season on. That's basically what it was. So I think that I would, I don't, I don't regret it at all. I think it was really informative. I think from a creative and professional standpoint, when I, if I just talk about it, literally from that perspective, it definitely separates me from almost everybody else. Um, I've never been interested in doing what everybody else is doing. In fact,
Now, as the more popular flower farming has become, the more disinterested I've become. It's like pretty good. It goes hand in hand. I think that's like the art artist background in me, you know? I'm still a grower. I'm a grower through and through, but now I just need to figure out, you know, how do I want to be now? You know, so the farm is built. We've been building the farm for five years. We just did the last thing we needed to do to build this farm, which is
Upgrade the electrical and run it to all the greenhouses. So that's done now. And I've built a farm from nothing. And so now this year is the year to kind of like use what we've built and kind of set our intention in the goals for like the next five years as to what this farm will do for us. And included in those goals, is it to continue to be selling flowers for 12 months of the year? Yeah, I think I'm going to push.
So we usually stop selling for six weeks about the, the stop selling window has gotten shorter and shorter as time has gone on. I am not interested in Christmas. Well, I'll tell you that right off the bat. You're not going to see, you're not going to see Christmas from little state flower company. I'm like done by Thanksgiving. I'm really not interested anymore. Um, I don't want to do any kind of Christmas tulip forcing or anything like that, because if you miss it, I mean, it's just devastating, devastating. Like, yeah.
to miss the dates and like what, like, I can't even begin to conceptualize that either. You know, like people, I just can't, I let people can do their wreath workshops all day long and do whatever they want. I I'm fine with that. I can, I can let that whole window of time go. So this year, the goal was typically to stop selling by Thanksgiving.
And then to start selling and have tulips again in mid January. and I think what I'd like to do is push the tulips further into the end of January, beginning of February. So we're actually thinking next year, we're going to try to push the beginning of tulips kind of to the end of January so that we truly do get more like two months off, I think. And that's by design for.
just straight up not having a crop coming in and having to handle and deal with it for a minute. The market is here,
You know, last year there was no problems with tulips. Like we just cruised right through and everybody did it. I didn't really have any issues with stem topple or humidity. Things were fine. And this year it's like the pendulum swung in the other direction. It's like the worst winter ever for this. So
Moving forward, it's only the second winter of me growing hydroponically. So I am new at it. I don't consider myself a professional hydroponic tulip grower whatsoever, which is exciting to say as this is my 18th year flower farming. It's really fun to try something new and to be excited about something new. Yeah. You know, so, um, I don't know. I mean, I think that that's what we're shaping up.
for this year. The only reason why I was selling into December was because my lilies didn't come in. They missed Thanksgiving and they came in after. So that's literally the only reason why it was just. Yeah. And I want to, can we circle back to talking about stress levels of flower farming? So like without a doubt, we all know that farming of any kind is stressful as hell and there's just no way around it basically. But I, so when I,
started my farm, I was convinced that I was going to be kind of like you and grow pretty much all or close to year round because I figured the more months that I can sell flowers, the less stress it is on me to basically make an income in a short amount of time. So instead of making an income in like five or six months, I can make my income in like 10, 11, 12 months. But since.
getting a lot of experience with flower farming and winter growing, I have completely changed my mind about that. And I am very like, I will never grow flowers in the winter probably, or not sell flowers in the winter, I mean, because there's, it seems like there's so much that can go wrong over the winter. And we were kind of talking about this a little bit before we hopped on and started recording, but I'm just, I'm really curious from my standpoint, do you think that,
this is really the right model for you considering that you are really pushing the boundaries on like all aspects of growing to have your season be so long or do you think it's like less stressful to farm in like a shorter growing season?
I think another reason why I desired this, one of the biggest draws to this was based on my employees. I am very, very loyal and dedicated to my employees. It's a very serious relationship for me. Yeah, I don't. Yeah, I know. I mean, a lot of farms just, you know, they need like 15 bodies. They just need the bodies, you know, like that's just not my farm. You know, an example of.
kind of a misunderstanding is that I gave an on -farm workshop a couple of weeks ago and one of the participants came and was like, oh, you're so much smaller than I thought you were. And I was like, okay, like I'm not quite sure what that meant. And then she's like, well, how many people work for you? And I said, well, this many. And she was like, oh, I thought there was like a lot of people working here. And I was like, I couldn't figure out what she was saying it to me for.
I just kind of blew past it and continued with what I was talking about. But I, after what I thought about it and I was like, is that some barometer for whether or not you think I'm successful? Not always better people. I was like, I was like, I mean, I'm not a huge farm. I never wanted to be, but I'll tell you, I crush it. You know, I'm like, I know what I'm doing and there's a reason to, for the size I am, you know, but, um, I think that the year round growing the number one agenda.
from day one was keeping the employees working. And if you're gonna keep them on and keep paying them, they need to be making the farm money. That's how that works. So that was the number one agenda, to be honest. That's where the whole thing really, the biggest desire came from. I wanted that when I was farming. I was always like taking care of fine, but I think that...
If I could create a real job, something that could actually sustain a person for their life in agriculture, I found that that would be really meaningful to me. That you could actually support someone in a way, your farm could actually give someone a job that they could actually start to build their life. Because the way that an hourly worker on a farm and a seasonal farm is not building their life at all.
You know, they're just getting by. They probably have other jobs. They're probably bartending. They're probably working somewhere else all winter. You know, like they're piecing their stuff together. But I thought, what if my farm could actually do it for somebody? So that role is very important to me. And I think that's where it all came from. So just to preface the psychology of what, like, was it worth it? The other thing is that flower farming has become very, very popular.
And everybody seems to be trying to do it in all their weird ways. And also,
You know, there's also a wholesale market that got opened, you know, 45 minutes from here. And that wholesale market invited almost every flower farmer within two hours of me into my market to wholesale there. So that actually creates an environment where.
If you don't have, before that, people were just excited to buy from me. I was one of the only people selling Dendida florists in this region. Really, when I started, there was no one doing it. I built a whole program for them and made it accessible to all the florists in my region to start buying from me. And that's how I started my business. And so the wholesale side of things,
It, that entire business that opened made it very easy for florists to just be like, if you don't have precisely what I want, and you're not catering to me the exact way that I need, I'll just go there. It was like a real easy out for them. And so I saw that. And also, I mean, we talked about this. I'm not exactly chasing down new wholesale ideas. That's like not at this age. This is not the, that's not the direction I'm going in. I'm looking for ways to make more money from what I'm doing, not less.
I think growing year round also came from kind of that too. Like if I can spread out the need to rely on peak season production when it's hot, I don't like working in 90 degree weather. The flowers don't like to be in 90 degree weather. Um, it takes a lot of resources and water and effort to make those flowers happen in 90 degree weather. It's very hot here in the summer. So I think that the.
The last two years we've been growing year round on the farm. And the one thing I can say for sure in terms of the stress and the workload is that it's spread out throughout the year. And I don't feel as much pressure during the summer as I used to. So I used to work huge days. I was hustling. I was driving flowers all over the place. I was like really trying to push really hard to sell everything I could in that shorter window of time.
And now I have, that is almost gone. I don't feel that way at all during the summer. Yeah. I feel like we can grow. I'm more mindful of how much I grow now. I just grow what I can sell. I don't have a huge amount of surplus and extra stuff laying around ever. That's good. Almost ever. I sell almost everything I grow now. And I've really been able to kind of hone that in. I still sell to florist. I've got my core group during the regular season, like during.
When I just have run on gulis and things like that, I'll sell to anywhere between like eight and 12 florists a week. And then as soon as Dahlia season kicks in, that can escalate up to like 40 to sometimes 50. It depends on how crazy things are. Uh, that's florists per week. So the escalation when Dahlia season hits is pretty high, but I don't know. I mean, I think that I like to grow year round. I like.
keeping the income coming in, there really is something to say for, you know, cash. Yeah. There's something to say for making $4 ,000 last weekend in January, you know, but remember I just filled how many times I had to fill my propane tank. So, you know, there's it all kind of all, you know, you don't know till you know, till the numbers are crunched out, you know, you can definitely cannot be winter growing without watching your numbers. That's for sure.
I don't think you should be growing at all if you're not watching your numbers. I think a lot of people grow without watching their numbers. I mean, how many times do you see on Facebook, people ask, what should I charge for this? And I'm like, that not that question is completely. It in another dimension for me. I look, I feel whenever I see that question or people ask me that stuff, I think, have you not even, you're trying to run a business. You haven't even taken business one on one.
How much did it cost you to make that thing? How much money do you need to live? And then that's what your number is. It has nothing to do with an international wholesale Dutch market with a big auction. You know, the, the snapdragon is being sold on the big international market. It has nothing to do with what's happening on your little farm. You know, those two things are different. So it doesn't matter what they're getting in that market, you know,
Yes. You're speaking my language. So yeah, the answer is I do think that during the summer I stopped working at, you know, we work from 6 AM to two and then I go to the beach. Heck yes. That was going to be three to five times a week. We go to the beach at the end of the day. Yep. I think that is such a great example because I struggle with this a lot.
When I first started my business, it was just freaking hustling nonstop all the time, just trying to get that thing off the ground, which part of me feels like that might be a prerequisite to having a successful business. Part of me feels like I could have done it differently if I had known better, but I just didn't have the experience. But at a certain point, I have so many farming friends that just work endless hours all the time, especially in the summer.
They're out there at sex harvesting and then they're out there after dinner harvesting and it's just a nonstop slog. And at some point your business has to not do that. So you can do things like enjoy your life and go to the beach. I mean, what's the point of doing it otherwise? I'm not sure what the point. I think everyone has their own point. You know, every farm is so different from each other, you know, and.
Some people have five kids, you know, some people. That's true. Don't some people don't some people have a partner making another income. Some people don't some people farm together, you know, and some people own their property. Other people are just managing for someone around here. We have a lot of millionaire, millionaire farms with a farmer growing flowers for them and they can wholesale and sell things real cheap because they're getting a paycheck. So they don't care. And that's just really interesting. Yeah. I mean, that's.
So that's the way a lot of stuff like this is. And that creates kind of a weird glut in the wholesale market because they're fine with, you know, doing that because they're still going to get their paycheck. Right. You know, when you're like the real business owner. No, when you're the business owner and you have to, I own my greenhouses, I own, I had to put in my irrigation, you know, I had to pay my mortgage, pay my own health insurance, all that kind of crap, pay the car payments. Like.
You know, pay for life. And if you're going to pay for life, I'm certainly not going to do something that isn't going to make be profitable because I can, then I'm not going to be able to pay for my life. So you need, you know, I have the fire inside me to be able to afford my life. There's no one for me to fall back on, you Yeah, I definitely think that's part of it. Like, you know, having the fire, it has to work. Yeah, it does.
It's not a joke, you know, it's a business and it's a lifestyle choice, but it has to work and it has to make money. So if you're not charging enough and you're just, what are you doing? You're breaking your body and you're spending money that you don't need to be spending, you know, you don't need to be doing any of it if it's not making money in my opinion, but that's just my, my opinion. Not everybody feels that way. I think. Well, I certainly feel that way. And that's like one of my soap boxes that I'm always on. And I won't.
I feel like this is kind of bringing us back to that pricing thing that you were talking about before. And I think so many newer growers and even experienced growers, they are sort of missing that knowledge piece on how to actually calculate what it's in fact costing them to grow these flowers, which is why they're asking questions like, what do I price for this? Because they don't know what it's actually costing them.
And so that's something that I try to teach as often as possible, but I'm actually curious what your system is for keeping track of some of that stuff, what your record keeping looks like and what kind of systems you use. And if you're, are you continually tracking your cost for specific crops or is it something you figured out in the past and you know, you're making money from it? I want to know more about your approach to that. So my approach to pricing the flowers is.
rooted in what I charge for wholesale to the florist, because a lot of my florists that I'm selling to my immediate area are turning around and selling my flowers to their clients. Yeah. And I'm very observant of what they charge for those flowers, because that's what I want to charge for my flowers. Yeah. Like I think, well, I'm the one who freaking made it happen from nothing. I did the miracle.
Yeah, I should get that. You know what I mean? Yeah. So I, and I really did my psychology at one point started to change being like, if I can get that for what I'm doing, I don't have to, that's like four times, three times more than I'm used to getting. That means I can grow less, you know, because you're not like trying to hit these big numbers by having to, so my record keeping is multifaceted. Um,
I have QuickBooks and my QuickBooks is connected to my bank account. So all of my expenses are linked into QuickBooks and all of my income that comes through Square from the farmer's market and through my website when people are buying DIY buckets and wedding bouquets, that all gets connected right into QuickBooks. And then also all of my wholesale invoicing is done. So I invoice the florist directly through QuickBooks and they pay.
for QuickBooks. So all of that part of things is tracked right inside QuickBooks. And then I have a bookkeeper and an accountant. Can't suggest that enough when you hit a certain point in your business, then you feel that you can afford that. I suggest taking that off your plate as soon as possible and have help with that. Pay someone to help you with it.
really helps lower the stress load. And my opinion was for me that I guess just personally, my personality, I don't want to be, I won't do it during growing And then I get behind schedule and then all of a sudden you're bogged down by like three months of bookkeeping. then you don't, and if you're not up to date on your bookkeeping, you don't know where your numbers are. So the nice thing about using QuickBooks is that you can constantly be looking at what your expenses and your income is. You can also see when someone hasn't paid you yet, you can.
have it turned on. So it keeps telling them to pay you, you know, you don't have to be chasing them. QuickBooks does it for you, you know, things like that. So I can look lifetime, uh, even at how many cafe early dailies we've sold. And do you keep track of each individual type of flower within those systems? I do for wholesale. So I can get very granular with specific flowers being sold to florists because that's how I'm billing them. That is not the case for DIY bucket.
And, um, wedding bouquets and things like that. I kind of just do that on site. Like I know our DIY buckets are $200. And so we price them, we price the flowers retail into those for $200. And then I'm always like, shove another bunch of forsythia foliage in there and shove another, you know, perennial. Cause perennials are definitely the, by far the most profitable thing on the farm. And we do almost nothing to grow them. They're here.
You know, so just pop in here like, great, they're back. Yeah. Like when you, if I want to make sure that bucket looks fire, cause then nothing leaves here, that doesn't look amazing. So, you know, if I want that, if I feel like that bucket looks like it could be fleshed out a little bit more, I'll walk right over to a Spira Bush and like cut a bunch of Spira foliage off of it and shove it in the bucket for him. You know what I mean? Like I'll make sure they look really good, but that's the benefit of the perennials.
You know, especially some of those weed perennials like forsythia and Spirea, just plant them all over your property because at any given moment you just turn around and hack a whole bunch of crap off of them and read it. So that's like that's stress reducing also because you you're not like, Oh, I don't feel like I have enough. You're like, yes, you do. Like you just go cut some of that forsythia. You know, you're fine. So, um, my bookkeeping, I do rely on the day to day like that with QuickBooks. Now that's not.
the perfect answer for everything all the time, but that is how I price out the DIY buckets and things like that to make sure that they're being profitable. And it also is based on availability and what's around. Um, and when I'm also, I should make note that any of the flowers are being sold, like retail into like DIY buckets, our ball jar, we have like seasonal ball jar arrangements. We have wedding bouquets, that kind of stuff. I'm very careful to use.
what I know will work for them because no matter how skilled they think they are with flowers, like you just should assume that you're giving this DIY bucket to someone who has no clue. Yeah. They don't have a in. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't, but they don't have a walk in. They could be designing in some Airbnb house. They don't know the environment they're going to be in, you know, so you have to make sure you're giving them things that are basically made of stone, like Dianthus.
Dusky Miller, you know, forced it. The, I said that a couple of times, like give them stuff that you know will work so that no one ever says, Oh, their flowers don't last. You don't give them Shirley poppies. They don't know what to do with Shirley poppies. Right. Maybe you can give them some sweet peas. Only one bunch. Don't load up half the bucket with sweet peas. They're not going to, it's not going to work for them. You know that. So you got to make sure that what you're, you grow stuff. If you want to sell into the retail market and like,
have people buy your product and go out and tell everyone how awesome it was and how long it lasted and how amazing it is. Make sure you're setting it up for success from that right from the go. But anyhow, so that's how my bookkeeping is pretty tied into QuickBooks. By having the bank account connected to QuickBooks, it's super, super valuable because every single expense that's happening with the card is already just being tracked in there already. And then I just have to, you know, my bookkeeper just goes through monthly and connects like fuel, supplies.
Right. Seeds and plants, shipping materials, like whatever, you know, and all of those categories are lumped. So I can go check on the expenses anytime. And, and you can live time, see where you are, if the numbers are up to date, but that's the trick. Somebody's got to be keeping them up to date so that you can constantly see where you are with money. You know what I mean? What about for individual crops though? Like, do you know if some crops that you grow are more profitable for you than other crops?
And how do you keep track of that? Um, yes, I do know that. So I did a lot of that when I was first starting out, you know, I was like tracking things and trying to figure out like what was worth it and what wasn't. Um, sometimes the gut instinct is sometimes, you know, do you know what I mean? Like I could just start this whole conversation with if you've been, if you've been, even if you haven't been growing a long time, if you are fussing and fussing and fussing with something,
Lots of spraying, lots of trellising. The stems are giving you trouble. They're not holding. If that, that crops not making you money. Yeah, that's like an obvious one right there. Don't maybe just either assess the situation next winter and see what you can do better or don't grow that crop and put your attention on something that didn't take as much stress and work. Double down on the things that did work. If you're trying to build your business, cause you're trying to make money. So I would say.
streamline and simplify what you're doing on the things that you know do well in your property that fit into the way you harvest in your schedule. By me schedule, I mean like there are crops that need to be harvested to keep nice all the time and then there's crops that don't. Like, dianthus can be picked once a week. Marigolds, once a week. You know, those are not crops where you're like, oh my God, I need to be out picking the dianthus every single day to keep it nice. Like, you don't. You can go out once a week and get everybody that's budded and flowering and you'll be fine until the following week, you know? So,
There's things like that. I love Dianthus. It's great. And it's an edible flower. So, you know, it does serve multiple purpose and you can cut it green all the way to flowering. It's like a wonderful, flexible crop and it's made of stone. The thing will last forever. So you can, you can bulk harvest that in your cooler and just be using it all week long, you know, and, um, it's great for restaurant accounts and it's really good for the DIY customers, you know, so that, so in that sense you can use your gut, but,
Also, if you're really trying to figure out if something's making you money, something like Dianthus, I mean, sorry, Dahlia, excuse me. I can tell you now that Dahlia is the most popular crop on the farm. That's one of them, at least that seems obvious, but I've been actively working hard to make that scale tip. Because I know that they're not the most profitable on the farm. I actually know that. Yeah. So.
How I would decide and figure something like that out. First of all, it's just straight up labor hours. How many labor hours went into the crop? That's the very first thing I want to know. Dahlia's take by miles and miles and miles. They take more labor than anything else. I grow so much time. I need at least three to five people to be growing Dahlia's and keep them weeded, keep them good, keep them sprayed, keep them harvested. That crop needs to be constantly harvested.
And then handled, they're very fragile. They need to be handled appropriately to be sold quickly. Like the whole entire experience is laborious, you know? And that's the first thing I will track on a crop. If I'm worried about profitability. The next thing you track your labor hours? Do you have your employees do that? Or do you do it? I actually haven't done it in a long time, but yes, that's what we'll do. We'll, if we're tracking a crop, I will ask the staff.
to track their labor hours on a crop specifically. I'm small enough now that that's still possible. That's the nice thing is to keep keeping your size manageable so you can do these kinds of things when you need to or want to. If you're too big and you have so many things going on and it's just like total chaos all the time, it's not gonna be, you can't come up with a clear system to ask your employees to track things. You could do it as simply as have a notepad in the,
in the work van and every time they've touched the dahlias, you literally be like, it's part of your job to literally write down when you started weeding the dahlias at 2 38 PM. And when you stopped at four 15, like literally write it down. That's one basic analog way to just ask people to track it. And you could also just have a notes and the notes app on an iPhone. You just go right into a note and put it, having shared note amongst everyone and just literally everyone's just writing down.
Like some people are like, I can't get my employees to do that. And I'm like, they're working for you. They should do what you say.
Like it's part of your job. How to do it. Of course I'll do it. You they're done it. You're this part of their job, but anyway, that's one way I'll track. And then in addition to that, you can track any like, and that would include spraying them, trellising them, weeding them, the harvest time that's happening. And then also if you really want to get granular, any research and, um, any kind of research and, uh,
conversations and buying and any kind of other things that have to go with that crop. So if you really want to figure it out, you know, like if you're going to spend an entire day researching dahlias that probably should be put into the expenses that are going in to that crop. You know, like you pay yourself $25 an hour and you spent eight hours researching dahlias. You pretty much want to make sure that you put that into what the labor that's being spent on dealing with dahlias for the year.
And just track, track the whole year on every single time. And that's not easy to do. So that is definitely what I'm saying. That's not saying I'm not telling you that this is something that would be easy for someone to do. But if you're really concerned about the profitability of a crop. And it's like a life and death situation where you, you think you're losing money and you're like, I think I am losing money. It's like, that's a serious thing to think is happening. So take it seriously. You know what I mean? And like,
start to put and tell your employees, like, I don't think this crops making us money. I think we need to work together to figure out either why or how we can make it better. You know, like if we can't make it better, if we don't know why it's happening. So I think there's that. Um, the other thing that I track is, um, any like inputs in general, like, and also harvesting time. So those are the things that we would track on a crop that we were concerned about and.
Then of course you want to track how many are actually your yield and then what you're what you've sold. So if you have any, you know, loss or you didn't sell all of it, that has to be calculated into it too. So I do not like to harvest what is not sold. So we typically only grow what I think I can sell. And then I will grow more of things that we can leave on the plant. Like I told you earlier, things like marigolds and dianthus or whatever.
Um, and a lot of perennials so that those can just be harvested at will for the retail situation. But for wholesale, I'll only list for wholesale, what I think is sellable, what I think is the most reliable for them and that I can count on because they're buying, they're ordering a week ahead, but that's another conversation. Talk about wholesale and a different talk if you want, but, um, feel like we could have an.
Several hours worth of conversation with you about wholesale. So maybe we could keep it for another time. Yeah. Wholesale is a whole other world, but, um, I can definitely tell you that when I teach the heated crate growing, the one thing I talk about in that workshop slash study session is money. That's a really important topic with that. Cause the winter growing is really, you really got to watch your money and your expenses. So.
That's an easy way for me to track a crop. And I can tell you exactly how we do that. So if you just say like, okay, if we have, you know, this many anemone corums, there's, there's 86 crates of anemones in there right now. That's 15 plants per crate. Each anemone quorum, let's call it 50 cents, you know, whatever. And.
then you're like, okay, well, that's how much I spent on quorums. And then we use in soil, it's about $10 of soil per crate. Used to be six, it's gone up because soil is more expensive now with freight and everything. So now we say it's $10 worth of soil per crate. So that's $860 in soil. And then however much math out 50 cents times 1 ,290 anemone plants, whatever that cost is. And then we'll say labor to grow.
Oh, especially overwintering, that's very hard to track on those because the employees are here only a couple days a week. It's not, and I'm mostly the one opening and closing the greenhouses and you know, whatever. It's kind of more of a slow pace. Usually I'll just put a blanket statement of $1 in labor. That's for the overwintering stuff. I'll just say like,
That's kind of a number we came up with from the farm and flora collective when we kind of tried to track something once. So now we just say it's $1 in labor, even though I know that's high. I do it on purpose. Yeah. Yep. I always estimate my expenses higher. I always round them up. So no matter what. Yeah. So if I said $860 in soil, I'm going to round that up to $900. Yep.
Because you also have to account for your time to order it and go pick it up and all that other stuff as well. Yeah. All the things. And so then we'll track for the anemones. Like the winter growing is easy to track because it's such a controlled environment. Like the crate has a massive number of soil in it. You know what I mean? It's easier to track. And now, so now we're just tracking how, what the yield off of that is. Um,
And that's a very controlled environment and an easy way to track the yield. So then we're tracking the yield and then we're tracking the sales and we get, I'm hoping in a perfect world, we would get three good stems at the least. Obviously there's more is going to be higher than that, but I will start the math with just three good stems of anemones per plant. It's definitely going to be up in the five range. You know that five, maybe even 10. I mean, it can, they go on forever. Yeah.
Now we'll start with three and we'll, um, we'll see where we're at with like the three stems per plant. And you start to math it out that way. And then you're like, Oh, if we could push four stems per plant, what would that, how much income would that be? And what about five stems? And then even more important, you figure out, okay, if I sell, you know, 5 ,000 stems of anemones, let's say to florists, and you can only get a dollar 50 a stem, let's just say.
That comes out to whatever. I mean, I need to use my calculator, but yeah, me too. I got mine right here. What did we say? So if it's 5 ,000 and the florist, I mean, let's say you can charge them. That's tough. It really depends on what your region is like, but if you can charge your. Let's say it's a dollar 50. I think I'm doing a dollar 80 right now, but let's just call it a dollar 50. So that's 70, 500. Yeah. Okay. Well, obviously you're just going to get $3 of STEM and the farm stand for them.
That's going to be $15 ,000. So, I mean, literally compare the sales between wholesale and retail. And when you start to actually do that, Oh my gosh, you're just like, wow, I really could be growing a lot less and making more money. Yeah. I went, I spent a whole winter of years ago, like an, literally an entire winter. I did a super, super detailed.
enterprise budget analysis for like pretty much every single crop on our farm. And I spent so many hours like in the spreadsheet, just like playing with the numbers, like if I can get a little bit more yield or if I can charge a little bit more money, what would this look like? And it changed everything about my farm and how I managed it. It changed the way I looked at everything, how I fill the beds with certain crops. And I think that this is just like that like business owner mindset.
mindset shift that I think needs to happen for a lot of people to realize that they can grow on a less amount of acreage and still make the same amount or even more. Like we were talking about bigger is not always better. So you can really deep dive into this stuff. And I think before anybody even, you know, maybe they've grown for a couple of years, maybe they've got a couple of years under their belt and the thought.
of looking at this stuff is like daunting because they're scared. They're scared to know, you know, like sometimes I think that's it. Sometimes I think people are scared to know whether or not it's profitable and because they're afraid the answer is going to be no. And they're like, well, then what? Oh, but there's things that you can do, you know? Well, I do want to back up for one second because what I was saying about like figuring out the anemone expenses and stuff. So like that.
Honestly, that's just the gross of that one crop. Okay. So like literally talking about the gross, it's just a piece of the puzzle. So if I just talk about how much money I can make off one crop like that, that is a chewable way to actually take a look at a crop. And then obviously if you did that with all your crops on your whole farm, which I grow hundreds of crops, so there's no way that's happening. But if you could do it, you know, if you're a smaller farm and you're only growing six annuals,
Which I think that's a lot of people, you know, like I think there's a lot of people who literally just grow like six or seven annuals and they're like big backyard. And that's like, they're, they're calling themselves a flower farm, which is fine. That's a flower farm to me. That's a garden, but you know, that's like, I get it. Like they're, they're working their way with something and they're just trying to do it. That is, that's a very simple way. When you're small and simpler like that, that's the time to implement what you're talking about. And.
Because you're not complex yet. Like when you're as complex as I am, it's a lot harder to figure all the pieces of the puzzle out all the time. But if you're just small right now and you're scared to go do an enterprise budget on a crop, I think you should actually think the opposite. This is the time to do it. Because if you keep getting bigger and you grow your business and become more complex, it's going to be a lot harder to figure it out. So now's the time. You know, like...
If you're just growing on a little half acre and you're just doing your leg zinnias and snaps and marigolds and, you know, dust the Miller now's the time because it's simpler and you can definitely track stuff when you're only that functioning on that level. But I think the, you know, that I'm just talking about those anemones. The gross, the gross, I just make off that one planting in that one situation that is not talking about.
the overall bracket, like the overarching expenses of paying a mortgage, because those anemones are being grown on a property that I'm paying for. So that is the other step is that you have to figure out at the end of year what your net was. So if you do this on your crops and you're like, okay, I made this much on this anemone planting, I made this much on this anemone planting, okay, you can pretty much guarantee unless you have a big problem that that'll pretty much be the standard number for your anemone planting year to year.
You know, you might have some screw up here and there as years go on, but you pretty much can use those numbers and rely on them. You don't necessarily have to do it every year. So you could be like, okay, well, this is how much we generally make on the anemones and the heated greenhouse production. Number X. The years go on and you do more and more of these numbers. You have a much better understanding of this is how much money I'm making on these crops. This is how much it costs for me to actually run this farm. This is my labor expense.
This is my heating bill. Here's my compost bill, my fertilizer bill, my mortgage, like all of those things, you know, and then you can net and figure out if your farm is profitable that way, you know? And so QuickBooks is great for that. I mean, I'm not trying to sell it to anybody, but for me, it's the, what I lean on is the online version of QuickBooks because I can be actively looking my, my mortgage and all those expenses are already in there, you know, cause I'm paying.
I'm paying it out of the farm. So those expenses are all included. So you can actively see where you are a profit of like from month to month and your profit margins. And if you have a problem, you can be like, uh -oh, why do I have a problem? Right. Well, this is a process that I walk a lot of people through in my workshop so they can understand that they have that overhead piece of like your mortgage and your insurances and your website and marketing and all that stuff and how.
you have to take that into account when you're looking at the profitability of your farm. Oh, yeah. But I also think that, you know, one of the reasons why you are so interesting to me is because you do run this smallish but extremely complex farm. And I feel like my farm used to be similar to yours, where I never grew on more than an acre, but it was extremely complex because we were growing so many different
types of flowers and varieties. And after I sat down and started looking at the numbers of things, I actually cut back on a ton of the complexity and we have a super simple business model. We don't grow a lot of different kinds of flowers anymore. And I think it suits my personality better because everything is like very simple, straightforward. Like all my numbers are like pretty much the same from year to year. And I'm wondering if you think it's like a...
a personality thing or a professionalism thing when it comes to the complexity of the types of crops that different people choose to grow on their farm. I think for me, it's, it's a preference and a personality thing. Yeah. I, I did not own, if you do not own your property, as soon as I got a mortgage and was able to buy land, my grower goals changed. It was like, I always knew.
As soon as I own property, I can go deep with perennials and lots of them. Yeah. And not only go deep with them, but also use my beds and companion plant them like garden beds. So one perennial bed now has three seasons in it. And so it is complex, but it's way more profitable in that sense, because if you're asking somebody to go weed that bed,
It's not like, oh, that was a Columbine bed. Now it does nothing for me for the rest of the season, but I still need somebody to be weeding it. Well, that doesn't, that doesn't make any sense to me. If you're going to have somebody going through and weeding it a couple of times a year, it better be because the next crops coming in, you know? So for me, it became more complex once I owned my own farm, because I just really started going for it with perennials, anything that will work as a cut, anything I'll grow it. And it's all sorts of different stuff. You know, it's the.
Ground covered geraniums all the way to hydrangeas, you know, so, um, and very, all varied throughout the season. And whenever I feel like there's a moment on the farm where I'm like, I really feel like we could use another perennial right now. Like I will go to the nursery and see what looks good. Like, let's get it. Yeah. And I'll buy it and I'll be like, okay, we're putting this into now. And I do that so that.
And as the years are going to go on, I've only been on this farm for a little while. So as the years go on, it's going to just become kind of this like humming, you know, thing of seasonality where there's always these perennials to be cutting off of at all times. And, and, and then in contrast to that, in terms of what I'm choosing to grow, when it comes to annuals, we are extremely limited. Very, very limited on annuals. They make the least amount of money for the farm. That is a fact.
Yep. By like things like anything you're starting from Cedar plug that you are honing from a baby all the way to production is way, way labor intensive and suck and just taking so long and sucking a huge amount of energy from the farm. The annuals make the least amount of money for the farm period. I know they do. So, and that's from enterprise budgeting and tracking them. So, um, but.
You know, it's funny. I said this the other day. I was like, um, I don't know if you don't grow dahlias, can you still call yourself a flower farmer? I don't know. Yes, you can. But so the only, the only annuals we grow now are we do over winter annuals, obviously. So, you know, in my high tunnels right now, we've got boot plurum, sweet peas, poppies, Nigella, um, diantes, ranunculus, anemones, you know, blabbery, blabbery, blah.
Orlaia, Feverfew, things like that. That's what's all in there. Then we kind of do another planting of a lot of that stuff out in the field very early. So those things come to me in March in plug form and we plant them again. Then we really only do a very limited amount of hot weather annuals. So now what I focus my energy on for annuals big marigolds, zinnias of course, because I love zinnias. And, um,
I'm like, what else even is there? We really like to grow white dill. We do snap dragons, um, the early side and the late side, but not so much in peak summer anymore. And I really am pushing my business towards growing lilies. So we've been growing a lot more lilies. Um, I love them. And so the annual list, I mean, I think there's like nine crops on it now and that's it. Yeah. There's not a lot of annuals and I really like to.
Grow annuals. Like I said earlier, you don't have to harvest constantly. Um, but bachelor buttons aren't even on my list. We don't even grow bachelor buttons. I don't grow Nigella in the field at all. I barely grow cosmos anymore. Maybe once or twice we'll do a planting and that's mostly just for like ball jar arrangements and wedding stuff. I'm not even there's those crops to me. We call them, uh, the race to a dollar. Like if you're trying to sell those, you're just not making any money. So those are like accent.
touches now, they're not like things I'm trying to sell to florists that much anymore. You know, don't put it on the list. If I've got a good crop of it, like I'll sell it to them a little bit here and there, but I'm certainly not like, I'm going to plant like five beds of wispy light, delicate stuff that's really tangled and hard to harvest and then get nothing for it. You know, so, yeah, we don't grow any of those kinds of things anymore either. No, the annual game is, you know, it's.
I remember when I first started in the ASCFG conference, someone said to me, you need to grow a lot of a little and a little of a lot. Yeah. I was like, that was very, very good advice. I actually agree. You know, like every season has its main crop. Like think about peony time, right? Peony time is great. It's like, we, we call it easy street when it's peonies are in season because it's literally like they just arrive and you can charge so much for them. It's so great.
then there's always a few crops to go with it. If that makes sense. Like a few annuals to kind of support it. Can panty lawn snaps and yeah. Yeah. Just like a few, a few annuals to support panty season, but I'm not trying to like have a billion other annuals go during panty season. I'd rather just grow more peony and put energy into harvesting them. You know? Absolutely. Well, I think that your approach to business is obviously,
very intelligent and smart and comes from such a, I mean, you have a ton of experience. And so I'm super thankful that you are sharing it all with me and everyone else who's listening. And I feel like we could talk for literally days, like not even hours, like literally days about all the things. And I feel like we've talked about quite a wide variety of business stuff here and just want to say thank you so much for sharing. And I just want to end with asking you one last question.
And this might be kind of a cliche question to ask, but everyone always gives me a different answer. I want to know what you think the biggest skill is that's helped you achieve the success that you have so far.
I think at this moment in time when I look back, it has to do with.
my employee management and time management with my employees. I'm very particular about the scheduling of work on this farm and no one works more than an eight hour day ever. We don't do that. None of us. And I just don't allow it. It's just not, you know, I also live here, so I kind of want everyone to leave. So yeah.
So I'm very good at scheduling the workload and I make a work day, an eight hour work day. And it is there, we're working from the second they get here to the second they leave. Of course we have breaks and lunch and stuff like that, but it's a very achievable list. It's busy and it's a lot to do, but we can do it. And I know we can do it. So I'm very good at managing the staff that way. And they're very happy because I'm not,
asking things that are unachievable of them. You know, like the goals are, the goals are achievable. And I also really love collaborating with my employees and asking their opinions on what they think we should do better, how we could approach something better. What did they, how'd they think it went? I ask them all the time about these things and I value their input because they're physically doing it.
Like even more than me because I'm injured now, so I can't even do some of the things that we're doing. So, um, it's definitely my employee management. They stay a long time with me. I don't have turnover. Very, very, very little, you know, people, my last employee was with me for six years. Um, the one before one before that was with me for the one before that was with me three, you know, these people stay. That's great. And it's really valuable.
really valuable to have your employees stay with you. Um, and so I, I really, I do think that's been a big part for me because we love each other. These people love this business. Then they respect the business and they love what we're doing and they want to work hard for me and to make it work. You know what I mean? Yeah. So if they, if we do good, if the farm does good and the, and we're selling flowers and things are humming good, everybody wins. They get more money. They get,
They get time off, I'll buy them lunch, you know, like all these things are ha all the benefits come from that. You know what I mean? Yeah. So I do think it has to do with my, my employees. I give them a lot of credit for getting the farm to the stage that we're at now, because I couldn't have done it without them.
Jenny (1:07:07)
Hey, Jenny here, cutting into our conversation between me and Anna Jane, because the end audio of me and Anna Jane's conversation got a little bit messed up and we couldn't fix it. So I just wanted to say a huge thank you to Anna Jane for sitting down to talk with me. I always love talking to her. She is just such a wealth of information. And so you can go find her and learn more about her workshops and what she does.
at littlestateflowerco .com and she has a super active Instagram. She posts all the time, like pretty much daily, if not more than that, but you can find her on Instagram at littlestateflowerco. And you can
sign up for her email list through her website and you can get first dibs on things like Daliotubers and even get discount codes through her email list for all of her awesome offerings. So be sure to go follow Anna Jane. And again, I'm so happy she was here to join me and we will see you next time on the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast.
