MBAs and Small Specialty Nurseries
Ellen Hornig (Thu, 19 Aug 2010 06:13:36 PDT)

Whether or not a small nursery runs in the black depends to some extent on
how you define "in the black". An economist would say that you have to
cover all your opportunity costs, meaning you make as much or more in this
line of business as you would in any alternative in which you're capable of
engaging. By that standard, few of us indeed would be "in the black".

In the last couple of years, I've cleared around $70K - probably better than
I would have done if I'd stuck with teaching economics in a small state
college. However, I built up to that with years where I made in the low,
then the middle, tens of thousands, so overall I'm quite sure my career as a
nuyrseryperson has been less remunerative than continuing my career as a
professor of economics would have been. Besides that, I'm quite sure I
worked twice as hard as I would have in academia - there is some truth to
the supposition that many academics don't really know what work *is*.
Nursery work is a killer, 24/7. In a small enterprise, you the owner are
also the bookkeeper, the webmaster, the employer, the manager, the
propagator, the head worker, the long-run planner, and the worrier. There
is always something to keep you off balance: the weather, bugs, fungi,
failures to germinate, etc, and then the biggest one of all: you're growing
and producing now for a market you will not meet until next year at the
earliest, further out in the case of many crops. The potential for making
short-run adjustments is pretty limited: if you can't sell it when it's
ready, your choices are pretty much to donate it (and if you're remotely
situated, like me, you can't always even find someone to accept your
generosity; my workers' gardens are long since almost completely filled,
and institutions have overall plans into which my surplus may or may not
fit) or compost it (and even there, you have to pay the worker who empties
all those pots into the compost).

That said, I assume we all stay in it for the same reason: we love it; and
probably most of us get out of it for some variant on the same reason: we're
licked. One does age...the intensity of effort that was exhilarating at age
48 (when I got serious about my nursery) requires considerable
self-flagellation at 59 (where I am now), and I assume becomes simply
impossible for most of us in a few more years.

I also think that succession is simply not a possibility for most of us
small endeavors. Too much of the business's capital (its intellectual
capital) is tied up in the owner's head. How do I transfer all that I know
about my stock and its idiosyncracies, the many tricks of propagation, the
flavor of the whole business that makes it unique and therefore, to a
limited audience anyway, entrancing?

Maybe we just have to accept that most micro-nurseries, like most gardens,
are processes, not products, enjoy the ride while it lasts, and be prepared
to move on when it's over...

Ellen

Ellen Hornig
Seneca Hill Perennials
3712 County Route 57
Oswego NY 13126 USA
http://www.senecahillperennials.com/
----- Original Message -----
From: "Robin Hansen" <hansennursery@coosnet.com>
To: "Pacific Bulb Society" <pbs@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 19, 2010 12:25 AM
Subject: Re: [pbs] MBAs and Small Specialty Nurseries