On a farm in Nicholasville, hundreds of flowers are planted in rows along fence lines and in raised beds. Pink-y purple cosmos, white feverfew and lime hydrangeas dot the scene.
It’s Fika Acres Farm, owned by Jessica Lynn, who grows a large variety of specialty flowers in Jessamine County, including alliums, sunflowers, irises and mock orange.
Lynn has been farming for about three years, and she’s part of a growing sector of Kentucky’s agriculture economy: cut flowers. It’s gotten so prominent in the state, the commissioner of agriculture declared July Kentucky-Grown Cut Flower Month. There’s more than 200 such farms in the commonwealth.
“There's a statistic that it's like over 80 percent of flowers that come into the U.S. are imported, they're not grown locally, and there's a whole history as to how the American flower farm kind of died,” Lynn said. “I think we're starting to see a resurgence of that, of things being grown here locally in America.”
She grew up in a gardening family and dreamed of owning her own farm.
“It wasn't really until I got my own house and my own backyard and my own space, that I really got into gardening myself,” Lynn said. “I think it's kind of that like millennial awakening of getting into the grandma hobbies and all of that, and mine ended up being gardening.”
Lynn keeps some flowers that need more attention at her home, but the majority of her garden beds are on her parent’s Jessamine County farm, where there’s more space and family horses. She grows on about three-quarters of an acre.
“The benefit of growing locally is that when you’re going and purchasing from a flower farm, there are flowers that you’re not going to be able to get at the grocery store or other places because they just don’t ship well,” Lynn said.
She sells at the Lexington and Chevy Chase farmers’ markets, to florists and to Kentucky Flower Market, where producers can sell bulk.
“Buying locally, you get so much more vase life,” Lynn said. “You get so many new varieties to you and different colors, and obviously you're supporting your local community and local farmers.”
Lynn grows seasonally, and some varieties that have to be started in the winter won’t bloom until summer. There are hellebores and tulips in the colder months, peonies and forsythia in the spring, and dahlias, black-eyed Susan, bachelor buttons and sedum in the fall. She tries to get her hands on different varieties than one might find in stores.
Flower season in Kentucky peaks in the summer. It’s a sector that added $2.2 million to the state’s economy last year.
Lynn’s primary business is Fika, but she occasionally still takes on graphic design jobs, as flower farming is expensive. Shipments of tubers and other non-seed flowers are heavy, adding to procurement costs. It's pricey to import stock from other countries when you account for international shipping and tariffs. Base prices are rising, too.
“For example, getting in compost or getting dirt delivered — the price of that has gone up significantly over the years,” Lynn said. “Who would have thought that dirt was so expensive? But it is to get actual quality dirt that doesn't have just clumps of clay and rocks and all of that, which is not really usable for us.”
Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner Jonathan Shell, whose favorite is the ornamental sunflower, described cut-flower farms as one of the fastest growing industries in the state.
“We’ve got a lot of acres that are going in, and a lot of farms that are doing it,” Shell said. “The beautiful thing about this, you don’t have to have a lot of land in order to do this. A lot of these farms, I think the average size of a cut flower farm is about a half acre.”
There are also some organizations marketing the industry, he said, like Kentucky Flower Market, the SOKY Floral Exchange and Kentucky Horticulture Council.
“They just do a really good job of getting out in communities,” Shell said. “About every farmers’ market has a cut-flower farmer at them, and then trying to find these niche opportunities, especially around wedding venues and other venues that our farmers use to be able to have those beautiful centerpieces out there.”
Shell said there were about 90 cut-flower farms in the state in 2017. Now, nearly a decade later, there’s more than 230.
He said there are farms supplementing other crops with cut flowers, but many are all in on the floral business.
“I think we're going to have a burgeoning cut-flower operation, and the more that people are aware of it and want to purchase those locally grown flowers, the more growth we're going to see in the industry,” Shell said.
Savannah McGuire is the owner of Sav’s Garden, a certified organic flower farm in Richmond. She grows her florals on about half an acre and has done so for about three years.
McGuire didn’t grow up on a farm, but she studied sustainable agriculture at the University of Kentucky, focused on food production. After she graduated, she worked as a farm manager and at the nonprofit flower farm Greenhouse17. She wanted a farm of her own, but originally thought she would be growing vegetables.
“As I grew flowers more, I kind of started to value them a lot more,” McGuire said.
She now grows dahlias, zinnias and gardenias in Madison County. Like a lot of Kentucky flower farmers, she focuses on varieties that don’t ship well but grow well in this climate and can’t be found at supermarkets.
“We tried to just grow things that we can easily grow seasonally without having to do a lot of modifying the climate too much,” McGuire said.
Her main season is March to October, but she’s experimenting with winter flowers, as well, and is interested in expanding.
“I’m kind of always the type of person that has a million ideas and a million things I want to do, so I definitely eventually want to get back to my roots of growing vegetables, and then I would like to do more plant sales on the farm, stuff like that,” McGuire said.
However, like Lynn, she notes it’s expensive to flower farm, and she works a full-time job in addition to Sav’s Garden.
“It's a huge investment to get it started, and it's a lot of risk involved just in any kind of farming, so it's hard to make a living at,” McGuire said.
She sells her flowers at the Lexington Farmers’ Market and one in Cincinnati. She also has a bouquet subscription program allowing customers to regularly bring flowers home.
