Online Course: Cut Flower Production, Introduction to the Business of Flower Farming

Growing and Selling Flowers

Fields of flowers are dreamy and bursting with joyful color, but unless you have background knowledge on production techniques and a solid plan for selling them, those flowers can be more costly than profitable or enjoyable. This course will introduce you to the topics, resources and questions you’ll need to answer if you intend to operate a flower farm or add flower production as one component of an established business.

Target Audience

Aspiring/Beginner – if you have 0-2 seasons of experience growing flowers for commercial sale, this course was designed for you. Those with more experience will also glean some good information but may find the course too basic for their needs. Climate, soils, production systems, and appropriate varieties vary a lot from region to region, and this course mostly presents production information relevant to farmers in the humid, temperate climate of the Central and Northern United States. Farmers outside the region are more than welcome to register and will likely still learn a lot since many considerations for flower production are relevant regardless of geography.

Course Objectives

By the end of this course, you will:

• Understand the seasonal cycles of a flower farm
• Have a basic understanding of production techniques and growing season management of pests, weeds, and diseases
• Have several ideas of what species you could grow, where you could sell them, and whether these ideas are viable

Webinars

The bulk of the course happens on your own time, with discussions, readings, and non-graded review quizzes in Teachable, our virtual classroom. To add to the experience, live webinars will be woven into the online interface of the course to allow you to meet on a weekly basis to learn from outside presenters and ask questions to address your farm issues in real time. If you miss one, they are always recorded and posted for later viewing.

Webinar Schedule

Live instruction for the 2021-2022 season will begin on Mon. Nov 1, 2021 from 6:30-8pm Eastern time, and continue for 6 weeks, with the final webinar on Mon. Dec 6. While we encourage live attendance so you have the opportunity to engage with the presenters and ask questions, all webinars we will be posted in our online classroom for students to watch anytime. Once you have enrolled in this course, you will retain access to all materials indefinitely, and can return to participate in the live webinars as many times as you wish.