From the Fields - Rob Miller

By Rob Miller, Del Norte County flower grower

We have Easter lilies, Oriental lilies, hydrangeas and other flowering crops in the greenhouse. They’re in the middle of growing. The plants in the greenhouse are sold for Easter specifically. Easter dates vary greatly, and we control the flowering time with the temperature in the greenhouse.

We also grow bulbs in the field and ship them across the United States and Canada. They supply other greenhouses in North America with Easter lilies. Those were all shipped in October. They go into cold storage at 40 degrees for six weeks and then come out and get planted in greenhouses, including mine, sometime in December.

Insurance access is a challenge. A couple years ago, my insurer decided they no longer wanted to insure me because of the potential for catastrophic loss because of a forest fire. They based it on my brush score, which is a fire-related risk assessment the insurance company makes using an aerial photograph and looking at areas with the potential for wildfires. Then they draw a circle or line around the area. My building is between 1 and 2 miles from the closest tree, with irrigated pasture all around. They canceled me, and another insurance company decided they would insure me for six times more money for coverage worth about 50% of the previous one.

Most of what we do is labor-intensive. California’s overtime law for agricultural workers has made it hard to pay irrigators and crop protection workers to work the necessary hours to keep the crops alive. Sometimes you can’t get that work done in an eight-hour day, and we cannot find extra labor to hire.

We haven’t been able to keep margins up because we can’t raise our prices commensurate with the increased expenses. We’ve scaled way back. Our greenhouse facility used to be full year-round, growing various crops. We employed 100 people at one point. Now, we’ve shrunk back to just flowering crops mainly for Easter.