Nursery & Floriculture Production Industry Overview

Excerpt from Nursery & Floriculture Production Report

The US nursery and floriculture production industry includes about 50,000 farms with combined annual revenue of about $16 billion. Major companies include Ball Horticultural, Color Spot Nurseries, Griffin Land & Nurseries, and Monrovia Nursery. The industry is fragmented.

Competitive Landscape

Demand is driven by consumer income and commercial real estate construction. The profitability of individual companies depends on anticipating demand for various types of plants, and an efficient distribution system. Large operators have economies of scale in distribution. Small operators can compete successfully by raising specialty plants or serving a local market.

Products, Operations & Technology

Products include flowers and flowering plants, shrubs, food plants like tomatoes, Christmas trees, sod, and seeds. Large commercial growers concentrate on producing container-grown ornamental plants for indoor and outdoor use, including bedding plants (usually grown in flats and transplanted into beds by the end-user); shrubs; and flowering potted plants. Products include annuals like marigolds and petunias; perennials like day lilies and clematis; evergreens like azalea, box wood, pines, spruce, and juniper; tropical flowering plants like Bougainvillea and hibiscus; "holiday" or "seasonal" plants like Easter lily and poinsettia; and specialty plants like bonsais, ferns, and trellises. Cut flowers are a smaller segment. Because of weather limitations, most single-location growers can produce only several hundred varieties of plants, but national growers can produce several thousand.