Dear All: To add to Diana's comments, consider this: The cost of actually growing a plant is probably only a quarter to a third of the retail price. The remainder is advertising, packing and shipping, "overhead", taxes, etc. Then there are things like "opportunity cost", ie, the $100,000. that was spent to buy the land could have been invested in bonds, with certainly less risk and a more certain return on the money than investing it in agriculture. Add the taxes on the land (or gross sales), the cost of obtaining the various licences, liability insurance if you sell locally, etc. Growers need to live and eat, so there has to be a "profit" of some sort. I finally closed my nursery. The various governments wanted endless amounts of paperwork, and didn't care that they wanted it when I needed to be doing things with the plants. I started working for someone else eight hours a day instead of sixteen or eighteen, and don't worry about filling out endless paperwork anymore. I also quit plowing all my profits back into the business, and suddenly felt much better off financially. As Diana said, education is and probably should be part of the expense of selling a plant--your customers should know how hardy the plant is, whether it needs sun or shade, excellent drainage, when to divide if it needs it, etc. In other words, whatever it takes to be satisfied with their plant purchase. When I had a small specialty nursery (growing rhododendrons), I had to compete not only with the "Home Improvement" stores, but even the local grocery store and drugstore chain a half mile away. They brought in plants in pots from growers who sold off the poorer quality stuff at reduced prices. Plants were set on the blacktop of the parking lot, their clerks didn't even know enough to water when needed. I was growing all my own stock, and knew how it was grown, what it was likely to need, could tell my customers how to grow the plants, and couldn't sell at the prices the chain stores could offer. I'm sure they sold many times more plants than I ever did. You were lucky if they could give you a price, let alone anything else. The local, long established nurseries managed to stay in business by doing landscaping, selling christmas trees, etc. They didn't keep many permanent staff, and if you asked a clerk at a nursery, they usually didn't know much either. My suggestion to Joe Shaw would be that money could most helpfully be spent by getting the local governments to support the small growers by providing licenses, inspections, export licenses etc at no cost until the growers reached a certain level of gross sales. Marketing, Technical expertise, and start up funds would also help, but that probably isn't the biggest problem. Ken until the growers managed to