BlogYour market, updated
Most nurseries are family-owned. Most of the money is not.
The 2024 Census of Horticultural Specialties shows family or individually owned operations as the largest group by count, while corporate-owned operations account for 63% of sales. Most of the businesses in this industry are family ones, but most of the money goes elsewhere.
Sales are concentrating while firm numbers hold
This does not mean family nurseries are disappearing. Trade-press readings of the census count 6,437 operations reporting nursery stock sales in 2024, against 6,458 in 2019, and a drop of 0.3% over five years is effectively flat. Firm numbers have held while sales concentrated, so the large operations are growing faster than the small ones rather than buying them up.
Competing with much larger operations
Growers often take the consequences of that structure personally, but most are simply arithmetic. A large operation buys containers, media and freight on terms a small nursery will not get, and spreads its fixed costs across volume a small nursery does not have. If its price comes in under yours on a commodity item, nothing has gone wrong in your business, and you are not going to win that sale on price. The big buyers are set up around the big growers too. A chain that needs a hundred thousand units on a schedule, with EDI and a vendor portal, is not a customer a six-person nursery is losing out on.
What smaller nurseries do better tends not to show up on a price list. They know the crop, they answer the phone, they will take an order for forty of something odd, and they are three hours away rather than three days.
A family operation in this position has three ways to go, and drifting between them is the expensive choice. One is to specialise in what the volume operations will not grow because the runs are too short or the crop too fussy, which means higher margins in a smaller market. Another is to be the local supplier, competing on freight, lead time and a person answering the phone, which is strong within a few hours' drive and counts for nothing beyond it. The third is to be the easiest grower to buy from, with current availability, clear sizes and orders taken without three phone calls, and it is the most underrated because the bar in this industry is low. What does not work is being a smaller copy of a large operation, growing the same commodity crops for the same customers at worse costs.
Being easy to buy from
Specialising and being local both take years to build, whereas being easy to buy from can be done much sooner. A buyer wants to know what you have, in what size and quantity, when it will be ready and what it will cost, and every hour between asking and getting an answer is an hour in which they can buy from somebody else. The large operations solved this with portals and EDI because at their volume they had to. It can now be solved at any size, which makes it one of the few places where the advantage of scale has narrowed.
Sprout was built for that part. Every nursery on it gets its own shop link showing what is ready, each buyer sees prices at their own level, and orders arrive waiting for you to confirm, with no implementation project before any of it works. For a six-person nursery that is online ordering without building a portal. A larger family business with a sales team gets every buyer seeing the right price and the same availability, whoever answers the phone. It will not make a small grower cheaper on commodity lines, and nothing will, but it closes the gap on the one point where scale no longer decides.