From Tobacco to Flowers

Source from:  lancasterfarming.com Submitted by Editor on Fri, 09/26/2008 09/27/2008

Cut and bundled into bouquets, flowers are a fairly recent cash crop for farmers in Southern Maryland. Farms that harvested broad tobacco leaves for hundreds of years now gather in fragrant bundles of zinnia, sunflowers and daisies. The old tobacco drying barns glow with pails of blossoms waiting for market. Since 1999, when the Tobacco Crop Conversion Program began, 854 former tobacco farmers have taken the Tobacco Buyout; that's 83% of tobacco producers who have stopped growing 7.65 million pounds of tobacco. According to the Southern Maryland Agricultural Development Commission, as recently as the 1980s, some 50,000 acres yielded 40 million pounds of tobacco. The mission of the Southern Maryland Tobacco Crop Conversion Program has been: To promote diverse, market-driven agricultural enterprises, which coupled with agricultural land preservation, will preserve Southern Maryland's environmental resources and rural character while keeping the region's farmland productive and the agricultural economy vibrant. Flower growing, vineyards, agritourism and value-added development (wineries and slaughter/processing facilities, etc.) have become lucrative agribusinesses for former tobacco growers. Five Maryland counties participated in the Conversion Program - St. Mary's, Calvert, Charles, Prince George's and Anne Arundel counties. Buyout money came from the National Tobacco Settlement. Buyout participants agreed to convert their agricultural production from tobacco to another crop. Payments of $1 per pound, to be paid over 10 years, were figured on each farmer's average annual harvest from 1996 through 1998. To seal the deal, farmers also agreed to maintain some other agricultural production on their farmland for their lifetime. "The program was designed to save farmland for farming and preserve the quality of life in Southern Maryland," said Christine Bergmark, director of the Southern Maryland Agricultural Development Commission. The demise of tobacco farming has turned farmers' into agro-pioneers raising a variety of crops, livestock and other products, including grains; fruits; wine grapes; vegetables, organic and traditional; livestock - cattle, hogs and poultry but also llamas and emus; herbs and - for at least 26 farms - flowers. "The national statistics say cut-flower farming will earn $19,000 an acre, and that will top tobacco," Bergmark notes. "Granted this is a different kind of management and marketing, while tobacco was pretty much one type with set places for market. But it's potentially very lucrative." Brothers, Buddy and Tommy Hance took the buyout in 2000. Instead of tiny tobacco plants in their greenhouses, the Hance Farm greenhouses now fill with bedding plants destined for large hardware stores like Home Depot. An intermediary nursery delivers the material - seedlings in planting packs. Buddy and Tommy water, weed and fertilize the bedding stock until they're ready for spring planting. "It was a good opportunity," says Hance. "We didn't know anything except raising tobacco. The nursery sends a horticulturalist around regularly to answer our questions and offer advice… Raising bedding plants let Tommy and me stick with it, not give up the farm." Roxana Whitt and John Prouty of Wise Acres Farm in Calvert County and Judy and John Mast of Suttler Post Farm in St. Mary's County have turned from tobacco to cut flower farming. Their first year, Suttler Post Farm planted two acres of flower seeds - coxcomb, zinnia, aster and phlox - just to see how the crop would take. The seeds took, and the Masts took to flowers. They quickly learned what made flowers salable: variety of petal and color, length of stem and blossoming time, longevity and profusion of the blossoms. They choose their own flowers and do their own marketing. Like tobacco, cut-flower growing requires lots of manual labor, so the Masts had to figure out how to work smart and fast if they were going to turn a profit. Investment in a water-wheel planter and additional irrigation pumps eased the labor and improved their harvest. Like all experienced farmers, the Masts believed in their land and in their skill; they knew they would need to invest in their project. The payback: the fields of flowers and bundles of bouquets. Now, customers clamor for their bells of Ireland, sunflowers, yarrow and daisies. Since 1850, the Prouty family has tilled the 200 acres of Wise Acres Farm in Calvert County. The barns for grain and tobacco were built with timber logged on Prouty land by Prouty forefathers. Along with the tobacco buyout, the Agricultural Land Preservation Act and Smart Growth Initiative of 2001 offered John Prouty financial protection from increasing taxes. With their land no longer on developers' radar, fields are farmed and harvests gathered without fear of foreclosure in tough times. For generations, tobacco had been a small but valuable part of the harvest. A replacement crop would have to fit Whitt and Prouty's vision of Wise Acres Farm - wise husbanding of the land. In 1999, Roxanna Whitt saw an ad for the Association of Specialty Cut-Flower Growers. Cut-flower farming became the plan for Wise Acres Farm. One glorious season of fields full of sunflowers, zinnia, daisies and snapdragons hooked them. In the spring of 2000, three-quarters of an acre shimmered with saffron yellow, coral, white and a dozen shades of pink. "Flowers are really about beauty," John Prouty says. "People enjoy them, and we enjoy both the flowers and the people. The satisfaction is beyond the monetary." Science agrees. At Rutgers University's Human Development Lab, Professor Jeannette Haviland-Jones' spent 10 months observing how people reacted to gifts of flowers. The Emotional Impact of Flowers" study found both "immediate impact on happiness" and "long-term positive effect on moods." The Masts have expanded Suttler Post Farm's flower production from two to seven acres; they've added a greenhouse, a walk-in cooler, two tractors, a water-wheel planter and drip-irrigation. Judy Mast zips along the field-lanes in her golf cart aptly named "Flower Power." Beginning in mid-May every Thursday the Masts harvest 50 buckets of flowers, 250 bouquets per week. The family usually works assembly-line fashion, preparing 25 bouquets per hour, until all the buckets are filled. The work must be done quickly to minimize stress to the flowers. Even so, it takes 10 hours to fill the 50 buckets for their weekend's farmers' markets. Wise Acres Farm continues to grow into its new business. Flower seeds and fertilizer are sheltered in tobacco-drying barns, and the stripping room keeps finished bundles of flowers cool. Hoop-sheds that once protected tobacco seedlings now shield fledgling lilies and lisianthus. Prouty has extended his commitment to the land in other ways, as well. He has served as vice-president of the Maryland Cut-Flower Growers and lectures on "How to get started [cut-flower farming] and still like yourself afterward." Every summer morning on Wise Acres Farm begin with harvesting. Today, perhaps it's the lavender or zinnia whose buds are ready to unfold. Catching the buds early, with the dew still on the leaves, extends the life of the flowers. Each variety usually blooms for a few weeks. The harvesting must be done by hand, with long, sharp knives that won't damage the sometimes-fragile stems. Cutting a bloom less than eight inches makes that flower too short for gathering into a bouquet. Once harvested, the flower buds are tucked into freshly washed containers of cool water and moved into the shady barn. There they'll wait quietly until Friday, when Whitt and her team mix the opening blooms into glorious and varied bouquets. Larkspur and daisy, phlox and astilbe rolled in with some greens and ornamental grass - and the bouquets are ready for market. Every weekend they sell 200 to 225 bouquets. "Customers know our flowers," Prouty explains. Wise Acres sells every bouquet they gather; sometimes Prouty and Whitt agree to prepare bouquets for special orders such as birthdays and anniversaries. Wise Acres Farm has no plan to increase its flower production beyond the almost three acres grown now. "We're as big as we're ever gonna' get," says John Prouty. "There's more than enough work to do." When the harvest is done, the weed barriers are pulled up, the irrigation hoses inspected and repaired, the fields tilled and tidied. As the leaves pile up on the lawn, seed and nursery catalogues gather in the mailboxes at Suttler Post and Wise Acres. Another year's order must be made, old favorites and exotic new blooms selected and paid for. They order for variety and color. As Mast says, "Customers want some surprises, something different." Orders include unique flowers to surprise and old favorites to charm. "Every year I add something new and special," Judy Mast says. "They [customers] don't want to see the same flowers week-after-week." Masts order for a long growing season, for their fields must produce lush, colorful, sturdy blossoms all summer long, from May until October. When Wise Acres sends off its winter order, it usually includes 100 varieties of flowers: 5,000 seedlings, 5,000 bulbs and the equivalent to 300 packets of seeds. The earliest seedlings are set in February. Like farmers everywhere, flexibility in the face of unstoppable change is the name of the game for the farmers of Southern Maryland. The change, from tobacco farming to flowers, appears to be a success they can count on. Enditem