Some farmers finding flowers more profitable than growing tobacco (The Gleaner)

The Raleys borrowed $318,000 to build a half-acre, climate-controlled greenhouse that could grow tens of thousands of garden flowers and add a tidy income to bolster Raley’s slim government pension.

They are among a growing group of local farmers at the forefront of what could become a successful revolt in Maryland agriculture. Theirs and 40 other farms in southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore have created a factory-like network of greenhouses to produce a viable new cash crop for an industry once dependent on tobacco and poultry farming.

The Raleys still do farmer’s work inebriate and hay and raise a few Angus cattle, still these days the flowers appear to be to hold the greatest in number promise for a regular payday.

“Either my wife or myself would have had to get a job off-farm to maintain our standard of living,” Raley, 53, said of his colorful new revenue stream.

At the center of their new business model is a family nursery operation in eastern Montgomery County with a big contract to supply Home Depot with plants for its supplies in the mid-Atlantic.

The collaboration with Bell Nursery helps protect the family farmers from many of the ups and into a denser consistence that typically haunt growers, but it’s barely a sure thing.

Farmers have to keep flower spoilage down and look sharp their costs. And there are other risks. Bell be possible to end the relationship at the end of a season, forcing the cultivator to declare a verdict another buyer. Also, Bell’s only client is Home Depot. If Bell lost Home Depot, farmers would again have to sell elsewhere.

Even by completed achievement, the profits from flowers alone may not bring into existence enough income to keep the race on the till the soil. But for those who have tried, the gains is enough to make agriculture feasible. Raley last year netted a $15,329 profit from his flowers, but he expects that to soar to $70,000 in two years when he pays off the mortgage on the greenhouse.

“The idea is to try to have as many different ways for farms to make money like possible,” said JOK Walsh, who as executive director of Caroline County’s economic development authority helped further the business model.

Under the concept, farmers build half-acre greenhouses — known as Bell Houses — with their own wealth. Bell sells them seedlings in December, then the farmers mature the flowers in their greenhouses in the place of 10 weeks or so, carefully controlling the temperature and watering the plants.

Bell buys back the plants for two times the amount the seedlings cost but does not buy back plants that die. The period repeats itself in late spring, when the growers get another wave of seedlings. The season ends in April and then is over until the next year.

Gary Mangum, the co-owner of Burtonsville, Md.-based Bell Nursery, said each farmer gets a three-year contract to start, and after the third part year the deal goes from season to harden.

“In our nine-year history we haven’t walked away from in any degree relationship,” Mangum aforesaid. “We need the growers as much as they need us. We’ve invested too much time to replace and retrain.”

The Bell Houses take their inspiration from the Dutch, who are known worldwide for their dilating climate-controlled centers. Brainstorming with others, Walsh wondered whether in the room of building sprawling greenhouses, farmers could manacle together to appoint a network of smaller operations, much like the chicken houses that dominate the Eastern Shore.

Walsh and others urged Bell Nursery to try the idea and a assembly was scheduled at the library in Denton, near the Maryland-Delaware border. From the 20 farmers who showed up, two agreed to be touchstone cases.

The selling end: Flowers could be healthier, cleaner and more gainful than raising chickens. And the farmers would get help. There would be close supervision to help farmers diminish the risk of losing the flowers.

In adding, Walsh schmoozed banks, credit companies and finance firms to convince them that the idea wasn’t crazy.

“The smart, big farmers utterly rejected the thing,” Walsh said. “The profit margins look so dutiful, everyone was suspicious. In agriculture, you can’t make so much and do so well without there being a catch.”

The Lohmeyer family took the gamble. Their greenhouses in Caroline County on the Eastern Shore, near the Delaware border, are a work of art. Farmers come from miles in a circle to look on the Lohmeyer operations.

The polyethylene roofs, self-moving sprinklers and barley-based stimulating system that keeps the flowers in a crisp, 98-degree environment even forward the coldest January day have made the Lohmeyers the poster babe for Bell Houses.

Profitable, too. The four greenhouses across 2 acres turn a $175,000 annual profit, which is far more lucrative than the $150 an acre annual subsidy that the founded on government pays them not to plant on much of the farm.

“We heard about Bell and went to an economic meeting in Denton to see what they were offering,” said Charles Lohmeyer, who wasn’t making much money raising chickens and expanding soybeans and salt moderately. Business was so bad for the farm family that his son, Keith, ran a convenience stock down the road.

“I gave that up when this become profitable,” he said.

Bankers laughed at Charles Lohmeyer’s proposal to build a greenhouse. But he eventually borrowed $238,000 for the first of his four half-acre greenhouses.

To maintain diversification, the family still raises 56,000 chickens in a nearby poultry house.

“It’s definitely a profitable creature, and we are only working six months a year,” Keith Lohmeyer said. “When we are done, I go on vacations. At 81 years old, my father finally got a passport. He and I are going to get in a minivan and head-piece toward New Orleans in July and up to Nova Scotia in September.”