July is National Cut Flower month, while June is California Grown Flower Month. Coming off the Mother’s Day holiday- one of the most popular days for cut flowers- and leading into the summer, there is a shortage of cut flowers.
However, this isn’t all blamed on the pandemic. When the pandemic began, business closures, and people unwilling to buy “luxury” items when they are unemployed, dampened the market for perishable cut flowers, but now, bad weather, labor shortages, transportation shortages, over-consolidation, and continued closures have culminated into the shortage we are seeing today.
While the pandemic has caused a slew of shortages, most notably toilet paper and hand sanitizer, it has also been a culprit for shortages of other “non-essential” items. One of those shortages fell in the lap of the beef industry when the country was faced with an impending threat of beef shortages in the spring of 2020 after packing plants experienced a backlog due to closures and COVID-19 regulations heavily placed on businesses. While that situation more or less sorted itself out, there are commodities that are still facing the shortage scare- over a year after the pandemic began and cut flowers can’t seem to escape it.
Flash forward to 2021, and demand has increased greatly for cut flowers. More people are freeing themselves of the strict COVID restrictions and enjoying small gatherings and businesses opening up. This is wonderful, after such a dreary year, except we are seeing issues arise despite the pandemic slowing down.
On May 5th, Capital Press reported on the many issues at the forefront of the cut flower industry’s concerns in an article titled, “U.S. flower growers scramble to meet huge jump in demand,” stating that the reason expanded much further than florists going out of business.
“Experts say a few other factors are also impacting the supply-and-demand curves. The first is consolidation. Fewer domestic growers have led to tighter supply. U.S. growers are also seeing less foreign competition. The U.S. imports about 80% of its cut flower supplies annually, but because of jammed ports, limited air cargo capacity, vaccine doses taking up cooler space, and civil unrest in Colombia, imports have shrunk this year. Import difficulties have also tightened supplies of certain flower varieties. Bulbs from Holland are backlogged, and many farmers are having trouble importing specific seeds. Finally, labor shortages in both the agricultural and trucking sectors have recently made it difficult to harvest and ship flowers.”
FTD By Design explained “How the COVID-19 Pandemic Caused a Flower Shortage” in an article published on April 16. They describe, in great detail, how the industry has been affected and why. Here is an excerpt from that article:
Large Supply Without Demand
Florists and large retailers receive their flowers from a variety of both large and small growing farms around the world, including the United States, South America, and the Netherlands. These farms have their projected flower demands and plant accordingly each year to supply to their buyers. When the worldwide pandemic started shutting down businesses in 2020, the projected demand based on previous “normal” years for those flowers hit a brick wall. Offices, restaurants, and retailers that usually had large, long-standing orders for flowers no longer needed them. For some growers, this meant that the demand for their flower stock was cut by nearly 95%, forcing many farmers to give away their overstock they couldn’t sell, or simply letting them die in the fields at a tremendous loss.
This was an especially difficult issue for larger growing farms that employed hundreds of employees to tend to their large crop of flowers. Once the demand for the flowers was taken away, so was the money that was expected from those now non-existent sales. The dominoes continued to fall with growers forced to lay off large amounts of workers and suffer their own staggering financial loss. Many larger growing farms in California and South America had to shut down their growing operations and sell their farms because they no longer had the capital or labor to continue to run. Some of them are no longer used as flower farms, but instead as more lucrative cannabis growing farms, especially in South America. The result in the larger California farms closing and other farms no longer even producing flowers is a shortage that includes snapdragons, Delphinia, and gerbera daisies.
Transportation Issues
For the growers that were able to continue to operate and fulfill their flower orders, they ran into problems with getting orders delivered. With more people staying home, the demand for both air and ground shipping increased. Many people may not know that passenger planes are also used for shipping cargo around the world. When the world shut down and most people stopped flying commercially, that meant there were fewer planes in the air delivering cargo. Thus, air and ground shipping companies were swamped more than ever delivering necessary goods to businesses and retailers. Most delivery companies made more money delivering essentials such as fruits and vegetables, which unfortunately meant that flower deliveries fell by the wayside. Ironically, it was smaller flower growers with more local delivery options with smaller, private trucking companies that found more opportunities to ship their crop than larger farms shipping stock that would require much larger trucks that just weren’t available.
Poor Weather Conditions Results in Low Flower Inventory
While flowers themselves are not directly affected by the Coronavirus, they can still be negatively affected by unfavorable weather conditions. Unfortunately, 2020 and 2021 have been a poor growing season in many parts of the world that supply retailers with their flowers. South America, in particular, has experienced a colder, rainier growing season that resulted in reduced crop yields, especially for roses and carnations. Unfortunately, this weather trend brought on by La Nina is expected to continue these adverse growing conditions and still make projected flower yields smaller than usual. While flower growers and farmers alike have always had to deal with poor crop yields after a particularly harsh growing season, they at least had consistent demand for their product. After the pandemic has caused so many growers to lose huge amounts of their crop due to weather and decreased demand and subsequent loss of farms, it’s going to take a while for the world’s collective supply of flowers being grown to catch up to where it was in 2019.”
As the pandemic slows down, and things are returning to normal, flower farmers and florists are working tirelessly to provide quality flowers for events and special occasions. Small florists, such as Sweet Thistle Farms in Sanger, CA, or Heidi Hearts Flowers, based out of Turlock, CA are two of the many local florists who are providing beautiful arrangements in spite of the pandemic struggles. Thankfully, we may not have to worry about anyone’s panic-buying bouquets, so the shortage currently being experienced shouldn’t lead to a complete loss of flowers available.
