Greenhouse Grower to Grower Podcast: The Latest Updates on the Future of Skagit Horticulture
April 28, 2024
Greenhouse Grower has entered the world of podcasts with the launch of our new “Greenhouse Grower to Grower” series. In the podcast, which will be delivered every other week, we talk to growers from across the controlled-environment industry about market trends, innovation, their biggest challenges and opportunities, and more.
In early February, Skagit Horticulture in Washington announced it would be shutting down within a couple of months. Then in early April, the news broke that Smith Gardens had stepped in to acquire Skagit’s Riverbend facility in Mount Vernon, WA. The site has 24 acres of greenhouse production space and 20 acres of outdoor production space.
Skagit Horticulture gave its team a 60-day notice of its closure. Smith says the Riverbend facility was presented to Smith Gardens in good, clean, working order. Smith Gardens chose to act quickly on the acquisition for two reasons. First, plants are live goods and will die without proper care. Second, Smith Gardens wanted to strategically position itself for the future.
“We needed more space to fulfill our customer demand and continue to say yes to customer opportunities,” says Smith Gardens CEO Eric Smith. “It’s an immediate boost to our capacity and relieves some of the peak pressure we feel in our other sites. We’ve made long term investments in automation, forklifts, and floors in two of our sites, and being over capacity in those sites ruins the effectiveness of the investments in those sites because there isn’t room to operate. We have an opportunity to gain efficiency by some of the taking capacity pressure off our other sites.”
In this episode, we talk to Scott Crownover at Skagit and Eric Smith at Smith Gardens to learn more.
You can listen to the episode here, or you can find it wherever you listen to podcasts. We hope you enjoy it!
If you’d like to be a guest on a future episode, or you have someone on your growing team who would be an interesting guest, email me at [email protected].
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