Unique farm brings innovation to gardening market
Meet a business built on native wildflowers and grasses, and a couple's flair for marketing.
According to the time-honoured rhythm of Canadian gardening, people buy annual flowering plants at their local garden centre in the early spring. Once the risk of frost has passed - cross your fingers - gardeners eagerly spend days planting their annuals into flower beds. Summer is spent nurturing the plants with water, plant nutrition and plenty of TLC.
Now visit Wildflower Farm near Coldwater, Ont., the innovative horticultural business of husband and wife team Paul Jenkins and Miriam Goldberger. Over the past 20 years, this couple has turned the traditional notion of the garden centre on its ear. Looking for a tray of petunias to take home? Sorry. Need some insecticide for the home garden? Not here.
Instead, Wildflower Farm sells what it calls low-maintenance natural landscaping solutions, based on a wide variety of perennial native wildflowers and grasses. Each year, plantlovers visit the Orillia-area farm to buy plants, seed and seed mixes. Others get advice and buy products through the farm's website, www.wildflowerfarm.com.
Sales grew by 40 per cent in 2006, then doubled in 2007, bringing Wildflower Farm's annual revenue to $1 million. So what's driving this business? Goldberger believes Wildflower Farm is riding a wave of changing consumer tastes.
"Ten years ago, the word ‘environment' was considered offbeat," says Goldberger. "Today, more and more people are connecting the dots. They are seeing the effects of strange weather in their lives. They are experiencing pesticide apprehension and observing changes in water and irrigation by-laws."
In Goldberger's view, many consumers are reluctant to pursue traditional, annual-based gardening. With little or no maintenance to worry about, the farm's native plants and drought-tolerant turf grass are striking a chord with these time-starved homeowners.
New to horticulture, experienced in business
Compared to more conventional agricultural career paths - home farm, ag education, industry experience and back again - Goldberger and Jenkins have taken a different route. Raised in New Jersey and Toronto, respectively, they worked in the graphics and printing industries for many years, owning and operating several businesses.
At the farm, Goldberger and Jenkins divide day-to-day management responsibilities according to their individual talents and preferences. She leads marketing and retail sales. He handles field production and finance.
With no formal horticultural background when they began, the couple also owed no allegiance to horticultural tradition. Through long and closely observed experimentation, they've developed their own strategies for raising and landscaping with native plants, often departing from conventional wisdom.
"Everything we read said to plant the short stuff in the front and the tall stuff in the back," says Jenkins. "To us, that made no sense. We like to do it the other way around. That way, you're always looking at what's in bloom and it hides its own mess as the season goes on."
Marketing matters
Each year, Wildflower Farm opens to the public on April 22 (Earth Day) and closes at the end of September. Web-based sales keep on rolling throughout the winter, providing an important source of off-season revenue.
Goldberger and Jenkins have invested heavily in Internet-based marketing and sales fulfillment. It's not just the design and functionality of their website they focused on, but the back-end logistics to ship product efficiently and in good time.
"We don't track ‘hits' on the website because that doesn't tell you much," says Jenkins of their website reports. "We track individual visitors, and that shows an average of 800 people per day visiting the website, year round."
As they plan for the future, Goldberger and Jenkins believe they have the production recipe just about right. What will continue to set this farm business apart is a flair for marketing. In 2007, Wildflower Farm planted a 1.25-acre tall grass prairie demonstration site, which will mature over the coming years to form a wildflower maze. This feature will educate consumers about the possibilities of native plants, and the resulting public and media attention should drive visits and sales.
The path taken by this couple might be unusual for Canadian agriculture. Still, their experience highlights principles of business and personal commitment that farmers in all sectors are at home with.
"It's one thing to know how to grow the product and quite another to know how to market it," says Goldberger. "Our philosophy has been to keep working hard every day, on all aspects of the business."
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