While you’re still preparing your operation for spring and investing in new ideas, consider employing some of these improvements to save money and resources.
Let’s rally behind the healthy pollinators initiative. How will you step up to the challenge?
Precision horticulture is what you do every day — growing with precision for efficiency and profitability.
Seek out young professionals in the industry and in your operation to develop new ways to do business, improve communication and address consumers. How have you cultivated ideas from younger generations?
Your operation can benefit from hiring returning veterans, professionals changing careers and non-traditional students, in addition to horticulture graduates. Where have you had luck recruiting?
Many breeders are aware of the problem and are striving to ensure that plants in a customer’s home garden will live up to the visual appeal the plant has on a store display bench. A lot of the resulting plants were on display in California.
Creating our own advocacy is an important tool in areas like presenting science-based knowledge about pollinator health, and informing the public about how growers already preserve natural resources through responsible practices like integrated pest management (IPM), water reclamation and recycling, plastic recycling and sustainability initiatives.
Teach your community about how much the floriculture industry depends on pollinators and the responsible actions we take to ensure their safety. Listen to consumer concerns, help build bee havens and hotels and promote and plant pollinator-friendly gardens.
A growing consumer desire for locally grown produce is one reason greenhouse ornamentals producers should consider vegetable production.
Let’s make it a priority to show kids and the general public how cool horticulture really is.
Evaluate your business to determine how you can make your products and services more relevant to next-generation consumers.
Communicating the health benefits of plants is an effective way to market to younger generations.
The December 2013 issue of Greenhouse Grower is all about change. Change for you and your greenhouse business and for our industry as a whole. Some changes will be no-brainers. Some will be hard. Some will take a lot of imagination and creativity. But they’re all changes for the better.