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| A peony farm is a beautiful place to work and enjoy at the end of the day. Maggi Rader photo |
Naomi Brodersen (1,400 roots) had a romantic notion of peony farming. Although parts of it are like that, she said there were a lot of hard aspects, particularly the business side of things (including marketing) that she hadn’t considered.
Before you take the plunge, make sure you know what you’re getting into. Lease or work at a peony farm. Go behind the scenes to appreciate the time commitment, physical demands, stress, frequency and toxicity of commonly-used pesticides (this was a deal-breaker for some of the farmers I talked to), start-up and annual costs, post-harvest requirements, the marketing rigmarole, and, of course, the joys, too. For some, working outside in a field of flowers and making people smile is reward enough.
Brodersen said would-be peony farmers should think about their goals — is it going to be a hobby or sole occupation? “And then I would really try to get across how much work it was,” she said. “It’s a product people expect to be perfect. Just having a product that’s perishable and delicate, there’s a lot that goes into it.”
“There’s a checklist — the stem has to be straight, the side buds have to be removed,” she said. “Flower management — getting them in the chiller quick enough. A little bit of mold can grow while they’re in the chiller. All the things that factor into dealing with something perishable that people are paying a high price for. I didn’t consider those things. Making sure people understand that and the hours and hours of work that go into it. You kind of need to have all the skills. You need to be a solid farmer, a business person, and (do the) shipping and boxing, and marketing.”
David Russell, a Fairbanks peony farmer and president of the Alaska Peony Growers Association, reminds people that you have to wait at least five years for your plants to mature, then after that, “You are going gangbusters all summer every summer. Unless you go into this with a long-term business mindset, you will begin to resent the long summer hours spent in the field and not dip-netting, fishing in Valdez or hiking in the mountains — all the other reasons people live in Alaska. This is not an endeavor that allows you to take a summer off. On the other hand, there is nothing more special than watching your, and your family's, hard work turn into a thriving, blossoming business.”
Writing a realistic business plan and pinning down your break-even price per stem is an essential first step. RightRisk (alaska.erightrisk.com/) developed the Enterprise Risk Analyzer Tool to help you identify your break-even price.
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| Kelvin Brodersen grades peonies. Naomi Brodersen photo |
Chapin, who used to teach the growers school for the Alaska Peony Growers Association, said you should figure on getting $2 a stem. Hanscom said you should plan on only $1 per stem if you don’t do everything yourself. Brodersen thought that they would be happy with $3 per stem, if they could’ve just dropped the stems off at the co-op (and not done the boxing and shipping). You also need to factor in that you won’t sell 100% of your stems, a co-op or packhouse could take a 20-60% cut and wholesalers sometimes require you to pay shipping. In Alaska, peonies do sell for higher prices than elsewhere.
The Census of Agriculture reports detailed data on peony farms with sales of $100,000 or more, and in 2018 there was one in Alaska. Half of its stems (25,000) were sold at an average wholesale price of $3.25 per stem. Gross sales for this farm were calculated to be $163,000. This seems like a good indication that this farm is not only profiting but prospering. This stem price was more than twice as high as any other state. Colorado saw the lowest wholesale price at 64 cents per stem while California had the highest at $1.61 per stem. Statewide, in 2017, total cut flower and cut florist greens sales from 100 farms (probably mostly peony farms) was $940,683.
David Russell wouldn’t discourage new peony farmers. He said, “For new farmers, there is a tremendous opportunity in peonies. You have to look at it realistically. What level do I need to get into it? What level do I want to invest? If you want to have 500 plants and you have a couple boutiques in New York that will give you $6 a stem, that's perfect.”
But it’s not uncommon for buyers to back out, even at the last minute. Ron Illingworth who was president of Arctic Alaska Peonies co-op, said he anticipated a big sale to grocery stores. "Well he (the buyer) changed his mind in late June and we'd already purchased everything we needed and were harvesting at the time, and we ended up not being able to sell about 10,000 stems.” This figured into why the co-op dissolved this fall.
Klaver said that ideally, you want to lock in 80% of your sales contracts before the season starts. But he said when supply is high, buyers tend to be looser on their contracts and it can be hard to lock them in. Klaver showed that from 2014 to 2018, the number of stems produced in Holland more than doubled from 70 to 166 million—a massive supply increase. If availability overlaps, like it does in July, then there is direct competition with the Dutch-grown peonies in Alaska.
Marketing is a challenge for many. Brodersen said, “The marketing is the big hard one. Just putting yourself out there and talking to hundreds of florists and trying to sell yourself. That’s not something that comes naturally to me.”
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| Coral Charms demand the highest peony prices but can't be grown in colder microclimates in the Interior. Heidi Rader photo |
Hanscom thinks that this statewide problem needs a statewide solution. "What Alaska needs is a brokerage that will sell every single stem we have,” she said. “And we don't have that.”
Kim Herning (5,000 roots), who helped market for the now dissolved Arctic Alaska Peony co-op, thinks there needs to be a statewide marketing effort comparable to the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute. She doubts that will happen with the current budget pressures.
Adding peonies to an existing farm also could be a great strategy. It provides diversification and the initial investment is lower if you already own arable land. This worked well for Mary Ver Hoef, who added peonies to her diversified (mostly organic but not certified) farm.
She took advantage of the less stringent demands of the farmers market to sell short-stemmed peonies, which she can harvest more of without sacrificing the future vigor and productivity of her plants. Other markets require straight, 24-inch stems, which take a bigger toll on plants. She also sells at the Co-op Market Grocery & Deli, provides flowers for local weddings and offers a subscription service.
Ver Hoef sees peonies as a wonderful opportunity and just wishes that she had started younger. At one point Ver Hoef had as many as 500 plants. Now she’s down to 84 peonies after selling quite a few plants at the farmers market for a profit. Even so, she’d like to spend less time farming and more time on her family’s boat and enjoying Alaska summers. She’s looking for someone who might be interested in leasing her field.
In addition to selling the stems, there are lots of side hustles to consider. You could offer agritourism and workshops, provide a wedding and event venue or conduct research on your farm. Floret Flower Farm in Washington does many of these things well and there are also great examples in Alaska. But these activities are an additional time commitment during the busy summer season.
Kim Herning has been thinking about doing workshops and events, “But then I think I'm already so busy in the summer and I'm exhausted, how am I going to have the energy to develop other things? Do I really want to overextend myself?”
Peony farmers in Interior Alaska have had a spectrum of experiences and the reasons for starting and stopping are numerous. Many farms are still new and have yet to realize their full potential. If you do start a peony farm, you stand to benefit tremendously from the substantial amount of research done and lessons learned by those who took the plunge first.
This is a continuation of an article I wrote earlier about peony farming in Interior Alaska (https://bit.ly/2RS60NA and in the News-Miner: https://bit.ly/37TDxfH). Both of these articles are Interior-centric as I only interviewed peony farmers from the Fairbanks area. Other regions have some of the same, but also very different challenges and opportunities.
Heidi Rader is a tribes Extension educator for the UAF Cooperative Extension Service and the Tanana Chiefs Conference. She also directs the vegetable variety trials at the Georgeson Botanical Garden. She can be reached at 907-474-6620 or hbrader@alaska.edu.
