The Future of Horticulture Is Vocational

I can still remember walking into the greenhouse at Warren Central High School in Indianapolis during the winter. Outside, Indiana was cold, gray, and dormant. Inside, it was warm, humid, green, and alive. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had just walked through a doorway that would shape the rest of my life.

I was fortunate to have vocational horticulture available to me in high school, and even more fortunate to have two teachers, Phil Pitts and Pam Greene, who helped me see that horticulture could become much more than something I enjoyed. It could become my career. Mr. Pitts brought real-world experience as a grower and landscape designer and had very high expectations for what his students should know. Greene taught Floriculture as part of our vocational horticulture experience, exposing me more directly to the part of the industry that would ultimately become such an important part of my professional life. Together, they gave me something that I worry too few young people have access to today: the opportunity to experience horticulture before being asked to decide what they wanted to do with their lives.

We weren’t there simply to memorize plant names, fill out worksheets, or grow a few plants for a spring fundraiser. We were expected to understand plants and, most importantly, learn how to grow them well. Mr. Pitts understood that horticulture doesn’t operate according to a school schedule. Plants still need water on weekends. Insects and diseases don’t wait until Monday morning to become a problem. Sometimes something needs attention after everyone else has gone home. Crops respond to light, temperature, water, and nutrition whether school is in session or not. Between Mr. Pitts’ expectations and Greene’s instruction in floriculture, I wasn’t simply learning about horticulture. I was beginning to see myself in it.

And when high school was over, I didn’t go to college. I chose to dive right into horticulture and begin building my career. I don’t say that to diminish the value of a college education. Our industry absolutely needs university-trained horticulturists, plant scientists, breeders, researchers, and growers. But college wasn’t my path. Vocational horticulture gave me enough knowledge, experience, and confidence to know that this was what I wanted to do. More than 40 years later, I’m still doing it. That matters when we talk about workforce development because college shouldn’t be the moment when a young person first discovers horticulture, nor should a four-year degree be considered the only successful route into a professional horticulture career.

We talk constantly in this industry about the difficulty of finding growers, particularly growers who possess practical production experience. We talk about succession planning, recruiting college graduates, developing assistant growers, and competing for a limited pool of horticultural talent. But perhaps we’re beginning that conversation too late. Before we ask where the next generation of growers will come from, maybe we should ask where young people are supposed to discover horticulture in the first place. A 15- or 16-year-old isn’t necessarily going to wake up one morning and decide greenhouse production sounds like a fascinating career. Someone has to show them.

That’s why I believe high-school vocational horticulture can be incredibly important to the future of our industry. But simply putting a greenhouse behind a school isn’t enough. A greenhouse is a living laboratory, and operating one requires knowledge, commitment, and time. Agriculture teachers may be responsible for broad subject areas, and expecting every one of them to also be an accomplished greenhouse grower, crop scheduler, irrigation specialist, diagnostician, IPM practitioner, and environmental-control expert isn’t realistic. Nor should we expect teachers to somehow develop all of those skills by themselves. This is where I believe our industry needs to step in. Instead of waiting for schools to produce qualified prospective employees for us, perhaps growers need to become active partners in helping schools develop them.

Imagine what could happen if commercial greenhouse operations essentially adopted their local school greenhouses. The objective wouldn’t be to take the greenhouse away from the teacher or dictate the curriculum. It would be to become a technical resource for the teacher and students. Help develop an achievable crop plan. Help establish realistic standards for irrigation, fertility, pH, EC, temperature, and crop timing. Walk the greenhouse with students and teach them how to scout rather than simply telling them what’s wrong with a plant. Show them how sticky cards are used, how roots are examined, how nutritional problems are diagnosed and, most importantly, how growers think through problems and make decisions. Help the teacher understand equipment that may already be in the greenhouse but isn’t being used to its potential. And give that teacher something tremendously valuable: someone knowledgeable to call when something goes wrong.

Our industry possesses an extraordinary amount of practical growing knowledge, yet most of it stays inside commercial greenhouse walls. If we’re serious about developing our future workforce, some of that knowledge needs to find its way into the classroom. We don’t need every vocational horticulture instructor to already be another Phil Pitts or Pam Greene. We need to surround those teachers with enough industry expertise, encouragement, and support that their students can experience horticulture at a meaningful level.

Summer internships are important, but I don’t believe they are enough by themselves. For most high-school students, summer is the only extended period when they can work full time, and unfortunately that can provide a very narrow view of greenhouse production. Depending on the operation, much of the incredible diversity and activity of spring may already be gone. It’s hot. It’s humid. And because these students are inexperienced seasonal employees, they can easily end up doing whatever job nobody else particularly wants to do that day. Maybe they’re sticking poinsettias. Maybe they’re spacing crops, moving plants, or cleaning houses.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of those jobs. They’re part of commercial horticulture, and every good grower needs to understand the physical work involved in producing a crop. But if that’s all a teenager experiences, we shouldn’t be surprised if greenhouse horticulture doesn’t look particularly exciting as a career. They’ve experienced greenhouse labor, but they haven’t necessarily experienced greenhouse management.

To understand growing, students need to experience how greenhouse production changes throughout the year. They need fall crops and shortening days, winter’s lower light and humidity challenges, spring propagation and the controlled chaos of peak production, and summer’s heat, irrigation demands, and preparation for the next production cycle. There are different crops, different problems, and different decisions at every stage. An eight-week summer internship gives a student one snapshot. Learning horticulture requires seeing the whole movie.

That’s why I believe the school greenhouse and the commercial greenhouse should function as extensions of one another. If a participating grower understands what students are learning in the classroom, the summer internship becomes the next chapter of their education rather than an unrelated summer job. If students have learned about pH and EC during the school year, let them see how you monitor them commercially. If they’ve been learning scouting and IPM, put them alongside the person responsible for those programs and let them participate in a crop walk. If they’ve studied irrigation and fertility, show them the injectors, water systems, and fertilizer program.

Even repetitive production work becomes more meaningful when students understand the decisions behind it. Don’t simply teach them how to stick a poinsettia cutting. Explain where that cutting fits into the production schedule, what happens during rooting, when the crop will be transplanted, what you’re watching for along the way, and why hitting the finished-crop date matters. We haven’t eliminated the work. We’ve turned the work into learning.

Imagine taking that partnership throughout the school year: commercial growers visiting classrooms, assisting teachers with crop planning, helping students troubleshoot their greenhouse, and inviting classes into commercial operations at different points in the production cycle. By the time those students arrive for summer employment, they’re no longer just inexperienced seasonal labor. They’re beginning to understand the why behind the work they’re being asked to do.

And there is a tremendous recruiting opportunity in that relationship. A student may first meet your company as a sophomore taking horticulture classes. As a junior, they might visit your greenhouse, work with one of your growers, or spend the summer with your team. During their senior year, they can continue developing their abilities in the school greenhouse while maintaining that relationship with your operation. When graduation comes, that young person shouldn’t have to wonder whether horticulture can provide a real career. They should already be able to see the path in front of them.

Some of the most rewarding growers I’ve worked with during my career are people I had the opportunity to help “grow” myself. They didn’t arrive knowing everything. None of us did. They learned the crops and the operation from the ground up, gradually took on greater responsibility, and gained confidence because somebody invested the time to teach them. That’s more than recruiting. That’s developing a horticulturist. And perhaps we should be doing more of it before young people ever leave high school.

College may be the right next step for many of these students, and we should encourage it when it is. But for the student who can’t attend college, doesn’t want to attend college or, like me, simply knows they want to get started, there should be another respected path into our profession. A talented 18-year-old with several years of vocational horticulture, meaningful commercial exposure, and the mentorship of experienced growers shouldn’t be viewed simply as unskilled labor. That’s a young horticulturist at the beginning of a career. Give them responsibility. Continue teaching them. Show them where that career can lead.

Schools can’t be expected to solve the horticulture industry’s workforce challenges for us, and commercial growers can’t solve vocational education alone. But there is an enormous opportunity between those two worlds. We can continue attending career fairs, posting job openings, and wondering why applicants don’t arrive with the practical growing experience we’re looking for. Or we can become involved earlier. Find the agricultural education or horticulture program in your community. Meet the teacher. Walk through the school greenhouse. Ask what they need. Offer your knowledge, not just your old equipment and leftover plants.

Invite students into your operation in February as well as June. Let them scout. Let them test EC. Let them look at roots. Let them see great crops and problem crops. Let them make mistakes, ask questions, diagnose problems, and understand the decisions behind producing a quality crop. And when they come to work for you during the summer, don’t just give them the job nobody else wants. Give them a reason to want your job someday.

Somewhere today there is another teenager walking into a greenhouse for the first time who could become an exceptional grower, IPM specialist, propagator, production manager, or greenhouse owner. Phil Pitts and Pam Greene opened that door for me, and it changed the direction of my life. I never needed horticulture to be presented to me as the fallback if college didn’t work out. For me, horticulture was the opportunity. More than four decades later, some part of what those two teachers taught me still walks into every greenhouse with me.

If we’re genuinely concerned about where horticulture’s next generation will come from, perhaps it’s time we stopped waiting for someone else to produce them.

The future of horticulture may already be sitting in a high-school classroom. We just have to help grow them.