2021 Head Grower of the Year Steve Garvey Does Whatever It Takes in the Greenhouse
September 5, 2021 Steve Garvey of Dallas Johnson Greenhouses will be the first to tell you he is not an easy person to work for because he doesn’t take shortcuts. That may mean putting in extra hours or effort, even occasional time away from home beyond traditional working hours during the busy season. In the end, the result is always worth it for this year’s Medal of Excellence Head Grower of the Year winner.
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Garvey likes nothing more than jumping in a golf cart and heading out to the loading dock where he can inspect plants one more time before they make their way into consumers’ hands. It’s a thing of beauty to him, a culmination of his and his team’s efforts to be the best growers in the Midwest. With several acres of greenhouses in Council Bluffs, IA, to care for and a 12-state area to stock with plants, getting caught up in volume would be understandable. Not so with Garvey, who is all about value.
“I’m a box store grower who has grown millions of plants,” Garvey says. “My quality is every bit as good as any mom-and-pop garden center. That’s how I want it to be. I don’t care if a customer comes in to buy a little six-pack. I want it to be the best six-pack they’ve ever bought. I want them to be happy they made the purchase.”
This Is Good Enough Isn’t Good Enough
Any wholesale supplier can turn out products that, from all outward appearances, look enticing on store shelves. The real triumph comes in having satisfied and loyal customers, whether it’s the retailer you supply or the person who purchases the plant for their home. Garvey understands this all too well.
“Set yourself apart. Set your company apart from some of the low-quality plants you see on the market and make the extra effort to achieve quality,” he says. “This is a long game. We want people to enjoy their plants enough that they return for more. That’s good business for the retailers you supply, and it benefits the company you work for down the road.”
Garvey appreciates more than most what goes into producing a quality plant. He didn’t have access to the advanced growing technology he does now at Dallas Johnson Greenhouses during the early years of his career. He remembers hours spent watering plants with a hose and walking rows of crops with a hand-held pump sprayer, among other things. He didn’t have the benefit of another grower to teach him how to grow annuals and perennials. Trial and error taught him those lessons. However, Garvey doesn’t regret those early experiences that molded him into the intuitive grower he is today.
“I’ve done both extremes with growing,” Garvey says. “It is what makes me a well-rounded grower. I bring that same philosophy to my team. Everyone who joins my team learns the fundamentals of growing hands-on to set the groundwork for determining the needs of the plants they care for instead of always relying on technology to do the job for them.”
Garvey tries to give his team of 26 growers a lot of leeway to be instinctual growers who think for themselves, rather than employees who can only follow a set growing recipe. This involves a certain amount of trust in your team. Garvey says one of his greatest strengths has come from the realization that he doesn’t have to go it alone, especially when he has a strong team behind him.
Garvey also encourages his team to be honest with him. Just because he’s the boss doesn’t mean his people can’t speak openly to him when something isn’t working or when they have an idea that might work better. Listening to those different viewpoints is part of building a strong relationship with them and finding a healthy balance between letting them follow their instincts and stepping in when necessary.
Do It Right the First Time and Do It With Class
With 26 personalities to manage, it isn’t always easy to create a cohesive team. Garvey has two principles he lives by, and he tries to encourage the team he manages to follow them as well — do the job right the first time, and do whatever it takes to do it well. It all has to do with working smarter, not harder.
“Time is the most valuable thing we have,” Garvey says. “We might as well do the job right the first time rather than having to come back and repeat it a second time because of sloppy work. No one wants to spend any more time away from other pressing tasks or their family and hobbies than necessary.”
Instilling this type of mindset in his team sets them up to do their best work and to get more done, Garvey says. Yes, it may take more time. It may even cost more. Ultimately, it’s more efficient. If you don’t believe him, think about this. Dallas Johnson Greenhouses was a 50-acre operation when Garvey started there. Now it has more than 70 acres of greenhouses. The team is about the same size now as when Garvey started, and they accomplish just as much or more. True, they have access to automation and advanced growing systems, but Garvey also attributes what they accomplish to their work ethic.
Then there are the unseen benefits of doing whatever it takes to get the job done. One case in point — Dallas Johnson Greenhouses’ recent shift from once-a-week deliveries to multiple deliveries a week to ensure its retail customers always have fresh plants. The team worked hard to figure out how to make this happen and adjust production schedules accordingly. It has paid off; sales are through the roof.
At times during his career, Garvey has run into younger growers who have difficulty with the doing-whatever-it-takes mindset. They’re not keen on staying until seven to spray plants because they want to be off at five o’clock, or they want to do everything from their phones.
“That’s been one of the hardest things for me to teach growers,” Garvey says. “The reality is that with an operation of our size, we are essentially open 24 hours a day. I’m trying to figure out how to make this a 40-hour-a-week job, but it is a challenge. One we may never overcome because of the nature of this business.”
That doesn’t stop Garvey and the management team at Dallas Johnson Greenhouses from confronting their labor challenges head-on to make things easier for employees, whether it’s finding more labor or making the best use of automation and new growing technology.
One recent change that has helped with labor was to hire H-2A workers. Garvey says he was skeptical at first, but the change has revolutionized the company’s shipping process and how production works. The new employees are a welcome, hard-working addition he hopes will return each year to be part of the team.
The Growing Pains of Change Make You Stronger
Garvey is no stranger to managing through change and challenging the status quo. One of the hardest years he has experienced at Dallas Johnson Greenhouses is when the team switched to using HydraFiber growing media, without the benefit of a full-scale trial first. Despite some failures, and everyone thinking they were crazy, the team persisted. The switch saved the company a substantial amount of money, not only in the purchase of perlite, for example, but also in trucking costs. Not to mention it made for a safer environment for employees.
“It was hard, but it challenged you to see how good of a grower you were,” Garvey says. “We had to change our fertility and learn to water differently because the product stays really wet. I’m proud that our team did it, and we are better off for it and plant quality is better off for it.”
What does test one’s management mettle is leading a team through unexpected change and uncertainty. The year that was 2020 put Garvey to the test. It took a little doing to get everyone on board with wearing masks all day, and when the Dallas Johnson Greenhouses team got vaccinated together, the fear of getting a shot was very real for some employees who had never been to a doctor. The company also had to go with fewer people working a range to accommodate social distancing and lockdown procedures. This was tough on the entire team, which made it through the challenges without a dip in quality and with very few people in the 250-person operation contracting COVID-19. Through it all, Garvey continued doing what he does best — leading by example, never taking the easy way out, and refusing to compromise on quality.
Quick Facts About the 2021 Head Grower of the Year
You may know that Steve Garvey, Greenhouse Grower’s 2021 Medal of Excellence Head Grower of the Year winner, has a passion for plants second only to his passion for quality. But did you know …
- He owes his interest in plants to his German grandmother and her massive summer vegetable garden.
- During high school and after college, Garvey worked at Gurney’s Seed and Nursery Co, the largest mail-order nursery in the U.S. at the time.
- He’s a former Jackrabbit with a B.S. in Horticulture from South Dakota State University.
- Garvey worked as a Head Grower at Lanoha Nurseries in Omaha, NE.
- He manages a team of 26 growers that cares for more than 70 acres of greenhouses at Dallas Johnson Greenhouses (No. 16 on Greenhouse Grower’s Top 100 Grower List) in Council Bluffs, IA.
- He serves on Greenhouse Grower advisory boards for the magazine and the new, upcoming GROW Executive Summit.
Steve Garvey of Dallas Johnson Greenhouses with his 2021 Head Grower of the Year award he received during Cultivate’21.
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