Highlights From USDA’s 2021 Floriculture Crops Survey
May 31, 2022 
The USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) released its 2021 floriculture crops estimates on Wednesday, May 25. This year, NASS expanded the program to cover all 50 states and more than 30 new crops. Due to the large number of estimates being issued, the data was released in the NASS Quick Stats database. To provide data users with a quick overview of the information, a two-page Highlights document is available on the NASS website. The usual PDF format publication will not be released, due to changes resulting in a greatly expanded data release.
Beginning with the 2021 estimates, the top 28 states are published individually, with the remaining states combined into an “other states” total. Care should be taken when comparing 2021 national totals with the “Program States” totals from 2020 and prior years, since fewer states contributed to the totals in the earlier years. However, comparisons still can be made by grouping individual published states together from both years.
To better serve data users, additional crops have been added to the program to increase coverage across all crop categories. This results in more data being released across all states.
Sales data is published as retail, wholesale, and total, rather than the previous practice of converting non-wholesale prices to a wholesale equivalent. This change provides estimates of price and value more directly related to the information provided by producers.
Highlights from the survey include:
- The number of floriculture producers totaled 9,558 in 2021. For the combined 17 states included in the program last year, the number of producers increased 8%.
- The total value of sales across all floriculture crops totaled $6.43 billion. For the combined 17 states included in the program in 2020, the value increased 6%.
- Of the 10 largest states, Florida had the highest sales, followed by California. Combined, these two states accounted for nearly one-third of all sales in the U.S.
- The top six states each had more than 500 floriculture operations in 2021 (led by Pennsylvania, with 783). Nearly 40% of all operations were in these states.
- Sales of annual bedding/garden plants represented the largest total among all plant categories, followed by herbaceous perennial plants and potted flowering plants.
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