Profiting Responsibility

Profiting Responsibility

Dreaming Of A Better Way

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In 1999, Fraleigh took a big financial risk, leaving a well-established career to return home to Florida to fulfill his dream of putting his family’s farmland back into production. With a background in nursery production, Fraleigh knew full well that he didn’t have the budget to sink into the infrastructure needed for a conventional nursery.

“Nursery production has been in my blood for years,” he says. “I worked for Wight Nurseries as a young 20-year-old and had the opportunity to get in on construction from the ground up at the Wight Nurseries North Carolina site, which is now owned by Monrovia. After spending millions of dollars in construction and costs and time and comparing that to what plants are sold for, I knew someone had to develop a better way to construct nurseries and grow plants. My idea was, it might as well be me.”

With his wife Donna onboard, Fraleigh moved home in August 1999 and started Fraleigh Nursery. Two years later, he dreamed up the GRO-ECO system, a growing process that uses 85 to 90 percent less water than conventional nurseries, reduces labor costs by 30 to 40 percent through automation and costs less than half the start-up investment required for conventional infrastructure, such as roads, retention ponds, ditches, culverts and irrigation management.

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“I wanted a first-rate nursery in terms of quality,” Fraleigh says. “I was looking to grow a quality plant as economically as possible out of survival necessity.”

After Fraleigh had implemented the GRO-ECO process on 15 acres of his land, a live goods merchant from the Home Depot with a background in production horticulture, Dave Hutsell, visited the operation.

“When I took him to the field, he just sat there and stared at it and I didn’t know what he was thinking,” Fraleigh says. “Finally I asked him, ‘What do you think?’ and he said, ‘Jay, you’re looking at the future of production horticulture.'”

Hutsell spent the better part of a year trying to explain the GRO-ECO process and its merits to the Home Depot and eventually left the company to join Fraleigh Nursery, where he partnered with Fraleigh to expand acreage and promote the products to the market. 

Less Investment, Less Impact

According to research by University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, 5,200 inches of water are applied per acre annually through overhead irrigation. As little as 25 percent of the water applied overhead enters the container and the crops utilize only up to 50 percent of the applied fertilizer. Therefore, over the course of a production period, only 13 to 20 percent of the water applied overhead is retained for plant growth and the rest becomes runoff or evaporates.

The GRO-ECO process, by contrast, is a platform that lends itself to automation, which allows Fraleigh Nursery to maximize chemicals and fertilizer treatments and increases their efficiency, Fraleigh says. In addition, readying land for nursery production requires significantly less time and money investment, and location is much more flexible than in conventional development.

“In developing new acreage, what took me months and millions in the old system now takes me just weeks from groundbreaking to planting, and at a fraction of the cost,” Fraleigh says. “I can put this acreage wherever there is irrigatable farmland, so I can be close to my customer market. Another big advantage is a reduction of wasted land, with more growing space out of the same acreage. In other words, if a conventional nursery took 100 acres and GRO-ECO took 100 acres, we would end up with substantially more acreage of growing area.”

Today, all of Fraleigh Nursery’s new production utilizes GRO-ECO, with a goal of more than 100 acres in production at the Florida site by the end of 2008. The nursery grows more than 75 species of container plants, from one-gallon herbaceous perennials to 7- and 15-gallon woody ornamentals.

A Win-Win Situation

The Florida Department of Agriculture has named Jay Fraleigh of Fraleigh Nursery the winner of the Commissioner’s 2007 Agricultural Environmental Leadership Award. The award honors agriculturalists who have demonstrated an outstanding commitment to preserve Florida’s resources by using innovative, environmentally friendly agricultural practices. Fraleigh’s development and use of the GRO-ECO growing system made him a candidate for nomination.

The GRO-ECO system replaces overhead irrigation systems and sets a new standard in the ornamental industry for environmental stewardship. “We’re really proud for the industry,” Fraleigh says. “With all the attention on biofuels and recycling in Florida, GRO-ECO represents ornamental horticulture well. We took a proactive approach and this method meets or beats the current best management practices that are laid out by the state of Florida. We did it environmentally and ecologically and that is a win for the environment and the business. Seldom does environmenal responsibility shake hands with the wallet!”

Fraleigh plans to continue to develop GRO-ECO with environmentally like-minded partners to provide responsible products to the end-user, he says. “We want the end user to feel good about their purchases and we want to grow nationally because horticulture is growing,” Fraleigh says. “This is a tough business but it’s a great business, and GRO-ECO will make it a better business.”

For more information on GRO-ECO, visit www.gro-eco.com.

A Sustainable Business

By far one of the most important benefits of the GRO-ECO system, Fraleigh says, is less impact on the land. “I’m not digging ponds and ditches and trenches, and becoming a waste water treatment plant,” he says. “Environmentally, it’s the best way I have seen to produce container plants.”

While growing sustainably does offer the ability to sell GRO-ECO plants at a premium, Fraleigh says the purpose of growing sustainably is to make the products as affordable as conventional products for wider distribution.

“We point out on our labels that we grew our plants with the best system available. I think retailers in general are looking for ways to promote their purchasing as responsible in terms of how products are produced and their impact on the environment and natural resources,” he says. “On the other hand, why should sustainable growing cost more? If we really are concerned about the environment, it should be as affordable as the competition. Isn’t that what Wal-Mart is promoting and isn’t that what eco-options are supposed to be about? Otherwise, greenwashing makes all this stuff a fad, and our world can’t sustain any more wasteful fads.”

The next 10 years will see Fraleigh Nursery partnering with other growers to open up the market for GRO-ECO plants while maintaining control of distribution. “My vision for GRO-ECO is a nationwide footprint that is supported by GRO-ECO customers,” Fraleigh says. “I want to be an extension of my customers’ businesses. The smart ones will take advantage of what that means. I believe GRO-ECO is the best way to build a profitable production model and several of our current accounts are submitting their requests for the products. We are customer-driven and that is a good way to keep it.”

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