2017 Summer – Regional Report Southeast

Hi everyone! I hope you saw Judy’s Facebook post on May 25 about Piedmont Wholesale Flowers, a new growers’ cooperative market that some of our fellow members just opened in Durham, North Carolina. The market launched in March with the help of a $10,000 grant from the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI), a Pittsboro, N.C.-based organization that provides local farmers better access to tools that encourage sustainability.

Growers’ cooperatives aren’t unusual for vegetable and fruit growers, even sheep farmers, but after a Google search, it seems we can probably count on one hand the number of existing floral growers’ cooperatives.

If you’re like me, you probably started wondering whether something like this might work in other markets, too. So, I decided to call Kelly Morrison, who owns Color Fields Farm just outside of Durham, to ask her more about what it takes to start a market like this and get her thoughts on how it might work in other places (and, yes, it can!).

Kelly, tell us a little about your flower farming background and where you sell.

This is just my fourth year as a grower with my own farm, and I still grow flowers along with a few vegetables. I’ve been doing some select weddings, selling at our local farmers’ market, and driving around selling to florists. I’m in what’s called the Triangle area, which is Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. There are no wholesalers in Durham or Chapel Hill, and one large local wholesaler with a warehouse and a couple of smaller pre-order wholesalers in Raleigh. It’s a pretty small market and all of us growers know each other; some of us sold at different farmers’ markets, and some at the same market. Most florists and event designers in the Triangle have their flowers shipped in. So, options to sell more flowers are limited.

And that led you to the idea to start a wholesale flower market?

Yes. I’d heard about the Seattle Wholesale Growers Market, and got together with Jillian and Katy (fellow growers Jillian Mickens of Open Door Farm and Katy Thelen of Happy as a Coneflower Farm) and we tried to do something like what Fair Field Flowers has been doing in Wisconsin. We tried it for one season but it was just too hard to get our flowers together—all our farms were in different places. I started thinking and talking more about the Seattle market and decided to hold a meeting last August with some other local growers and a few florists who buy a lot of local flowers, to see if there might be enough interest.

And how did that go?

It was a really good meeting and there was a lot of interest in the idea! But it was still the midst of the growing season so we decided to table the idea and revisit it after frost when things slowed down. When we talked about it again, and everyone was still excited about the idea, we knew we wanted to do it.

We identified Durham as a good food hub and we thought would be the perfect place to have our flower market, too. As it turned out, we found a location inside the Bull City Cool Food hub and rented space inside a climate-controlled warehouse (with access to coolers) immediately, before we had anything else figured out.

How did getting the grant fit in?

Honestly, we would have made it happen without the grant, but it sure does help. RAFI was another local group and they give grants to farmers, primarily in the Carolinas. For a collaborative grant, we could apply for up to $10,000, which meant we could hire a market manager. We found out we received the grant last winter, right before opening the market in mid-March, so things happened really, really quickly.

How does the market run?

The market is open just one day a week, on Thursday, from 8 to 10 a.m. Each of the growers sends in what they’ll have for the market in advance to Allison Donnelly, our market manager, and she sends it out to our email list. As of June 1, we’re averaging about six to eight active farmers. We charge each vendor $20 a week to sell there. We didn’t want to have any barriers to participation and because of the grant we could keep the fees modest. Customers must be registered in advance, and they pay each farmer as they come through, which can be a bit cumbersome but it works for now. And we’ve filed the paperwork to be a legal growers’ cooperative. We have all the basics done and are now looking at how to make it financially sustainable for next year.