Floriculture Is Up, With Foliage Up the Most

Dr. Marvin Miller

The U.S. Department of Agricul-ture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (USDA/NASS) released its annual Floriculture Crops 2022 Summary the last week of May. The report shows an increase in finished floricultural sales in 2022 of 4.9% over 2021 sales, yielding total finished floricultural sales of $5.934 billion (for growers with at least $100,000 in wholesale sales).

Figure 1 is the 2022 Floriculture Production Pie and Figure 2 is the 2021 Pie for comparison. (Percentages shown are each category’s share of the pie.)

Even though sales of bedding/garden plants increased from 2021 to 2022, from $3.40 billion to $3.56 billion, bedding’s percentage of the pie dropped by 0.2%, 60.2% to 60.0%, slightly reducing its importance to the overall finished floriculture pie.

The next largest category, potted flowering plants (“Pots”) increased in dollars by 0.8% (from $1.03 billion to $1.11 billion) and increased in share of the pie by 0.6%, from 18.2% to 18.8%.

Making the biggest dollar gain was foliage plants, up 8.9% to $826.3 million. Foliage also gained 0.5% in share of the pie.

Both cut flowers and cut cultivated greens saw sales declines and also saw reduced importance in the total pie. In 2022, cut flower sales dropped to $333.1 million (down 6.8%), while its share of the pie dropped 0.7%. Sales of cut cultivated greens dropped 0.4% to $101.3 million and its share of the pie dropped 0.2%.

It’s not shown in the chart, but USDA also reported on sales of propagative materials, which tallied $514.4 million in 2022, an increase of 1.1% over the 2021 level.

Total operations reporting in the survey were down by 6.2%, to 8,951 firms. Yet total floriculture sales, including sales of propagative materials (for those with $100,000 or more in sales) were up 4.6% to $6.448 billion. If we add in the estimated total wholesale sales for firms between $10,000 and $99,999, it brings the estimated size of the floriculture industry across all 50 states to $6.685 billion for 2022, an increase of 4.2% over the 2021 level. GT