By TIM THORNBERRY
Kentucky Correspondent

RICHMOND, Ky. — Picking out flowers for the front lawn may not be high on radar screens around the state right now, but for many in the greenhouse business, the season is in full swing.
Getting ready for the spring is perhaps the most important time for these businesses and more and more of them are showing up as part of more traditional farms.

As the agricultural industry here has taken a swing away from tobacco production, many of those farms were left with greenhouse facilities once used for growing tobacco plants.

Eddie and Tammi Warren have taken the idea and grown a valuable business to co-exist with their tobacco and cattle operations.

“We’re basically a burley tobacco farm and have always had beef cattle. I started, in the early ’90s putting up greenhouses to raise tobacco plants for myself and started selling them and developed a pretty good business.”

The tobacco industry has, however gone through many changes over the last decade first with quota declines, then with the federal buyout and plant sales dropped off. But the idea left Warren with an infrastructure perfect for the greenhouse business.

“My wife had always been interested in ornamental flowers, so we decided to grow flowers on the farm for retail,” he said.

The Warrens started with one greenhouse the first year and since have added two more of the five that were present on the farm.
“Our focus has been to grow what we could sell. We’ve never really gotten into the wholesale part of the business,” said Warren. “We wanted to be efficient and grow the best quality plants around and have them at a competitive price. But we’ve never tried to get too big, too quick.”

Besides hundreds of varieties of flowers, the couple sells some shrubbery, a few small trees and mums in the fall, and they have a store front area to wait on their customers. Warren said they have been fortunate to have used a variety of available resources to help with the transition including grant money from the state’s Agricultural Development Fund, the Kentucky Farm Bureau Roadside Market program and the Kentucky Proud marketing initiative.

“This is our eighth season, and we try to grow a little each year. We advertise in several different ways, but word of mouth is still the best way.

“The Kentucky Proud program has helped with some advertising and we’ve been members of KFB’s Roadside Market program and the Richmond Chamber of Commerce,” he said.

“When you do those things, you don’t really know for sure which advertising dollar pays the most dividends, but you do a little of all of it to try and get people in. For us, we were able to utilize some ag development money when we were changing the greenhouses over. There was a lot that had to be done even though the structures were already here. We got some cost-share funds through the county grants and were very appreciative of that.”

Warren also said those county funds are very beneficial to farmers especially those in the beef industry. The fund has been in existence for 10 years and is administered by the Kentucky Agricultural Development Board.

While the greenhouse business has provided diversity to the farm, it is still very much a traditional farming operation. Warren still raises his own tobacco plants for his 50,000 pound crop and has continued to sell plants to other growers.

“Tobacco is very important to our income to make this farm profitable. If folks are going to use it, we prefer they use ours rather than from some other country,” he said. “It is certainly not gone, it’s gone for a lot of people, but it’s still an important part of agriculture in Kentucky.”

But Warren recognizes the challenges ahead in the tobacco industry with last year’s government move that brought the Food and Drug Administration as the regulatory agent and difficulty for some to get contracts with tobacco companies.

He said the greenhouse business was a way to supplement the farm, but it was not intended to replace the other more traditional activities on the farm.

Same business, different reasons

While the Warrens are typical of many farmers that have enhanced their operations through greenhouse ventures, some people have gotten into the business in other ways.

Jamie & Jane Potts of J Potts Nursery & Greenhouse near Murray started their operation as a hobby after Jamie retired.

“I’m a retired ag teacher, predominantly horticulture, and we started this in the back sideyard kind of as a hobby about 10 or 11 years ago,” he said. “Our main greenhouse is basically what you would find in a tobacco float bed operation. But we have supplemented it with large vents and fans and it has worked well. It’s economical to heat and we’ve really been happy with it without a tremendous investment.”

Potts not only taught, but raised a tobacco crop for 40 years and began to work in landscaping as a way to work with their sons while they were FFA members. But it was retirement that sent him and his wife into the “full-time” greenhouse business.

“Our objective is a little bit different than most. We want to be sold out by the first of June. Our emphasis is on annual bedding plants with some perennials,” he said. “For the last two years we have run out of some things too soon, it’s been that good.”

Potts attributes most of the success by putting the flowers in larger containers than those typically found at discount stores, which creates a larger, healthier plant. Attention to quality and word of the better plants has gotten out according to Potts. He said once they open in April they just try to direct traffic.

“Word-of-mouth has really brought us a lot of good customers. If something is not the quality my wife and I would want to put in one of our gardens, we remove it from the greenhouse and try to nurture it back to a state that we would use it ourselves,” he said. “Quality and having larger and healthier plants I think has been the key to our success.”

For those thinking of entering the greenhouse business, Potts thinks it is a good idea. “I’m optimistic enough to think that any young couple or an individual that wanted to move in this direction to make a living, I believe it is quite viable compared to a lot of things that you just can’t afford to get into in agriculture.”