Greenhouse
grows family ties
When Blake and Julie Hurst decided to build a small greenhouse in 1986 they weren’t sure where it would lead. With her green thumb, Julie enjoyed growing flowers and the farm couple started selling flowers to a local grocery store.
Julie still has a green thumb. Today, Hurst Greenery includes a wholesale nursery growing under two acres of greenhouses, with another two acres outdoors. Customers are found as far as three hours away in all directions, with most at least two hours from their operation. And, eight years ago, the operation took on new business partners – daughter Lee and her husband Ryan Harms.
Much of their early growth is attributed to the Earl May chain of garden centers. "They bought our stuff from us when we first started, when we weren’t very good at growing stuff and we didn’t even know how bad we were. Neither of us ever did anything like this before," says Blake. Earl May remains their largest client with 19 stores in Iowa, Nebraska and Missouri.
"We are not sophisticated, but I’d say an average operation," said Blake, who also serves as Missouri Farm Bureau vice president. They sell to landscapers, grocery stores, small garden centers, and some municipalities. "We are large in that regard, working with a lot of retailers, but those that sell to Wal-Mart and Home Depot are 10 times our size and most are automated," he says.
The Hurst operation does have some automation. In one greenhouse is a transplanting machine that can transplant small seedlings into larger flats. Two connected greenhouses share a watering system on a boom that moves on rails to evenly water plants.
But, because the greenhouses are not all connected, orders have to be planned out by keeping plants for each customer in the same greenhouse as much as possible. In the spring, plants don’t go outside until they are ready to deliver.
Together, Julie and Lee are responsible for keeping the orders straight and growing plants in the right greenhouse for the right client. Blake and Ryan share the maintenance and delivery responsibilities, with Blake also caring for the tomato plants.
During the peak season, April through May, the Greenery employs up to 15 people with 10 staying on until the end of June to plant mums and other fall plants. Daughter, Ann, and her husband, Matt, help during busy times transplanting and watering. Blake says while 75 percent of the transplanting is done manually, the rest is done by machine. "We can fill up a whole greenhouse with 28,000 plants using about 100 hours of labor with the machine. We have 10 people working full-time planting the other 75 percent by hand. The automation is a tremendous savings. The problem is we are spread out into several different greenhouses and we can’t easily move the plants outside until they are sold."
For years the Hursts kept expanding by building more greenhouses. "Now we are trying to go back and fill in the technology holes we left behind. A new greenhouse can cost $20,000 and that tended to take all of the capital I had available. We are now looking at becoming more efficient."
The big challenge has been controlling energy cost. The greenhouses are heated with propane costing three times more than natural gas. "I am competing with operations that pay one-third of the energy cost. I’ve got to find another way to heat our greenhouses. We are just starting to do the research," says Blake.
The other challenge is timing when to plant where in which greenhouse. From planting to delivery, tomatoes have a three-week turnaround. Some flowers have a four-week turnaround and others eight weeks. Those plants can be shipped to the same customer at the same time. "We know we have several weeks before the last week of April to transplant a huge number of plants," says Julie. "If they aren’t transplanted by the last week of April they won’t be ready."
Although clients include Crown Center and the city of Lawrence, Kan., their most high-profile client is the St. Louis Cardinals. This summer, Hurst plants will dress up Busch Stadium’s outfield.
"St. Louis is a long way for us to deliver plants. It is not a real money-maker for us, but we really like to do it," says Julie. "We are monster Cardinal fans. We know when we watch the Cardinals this summer we will see our red and white Banda petunias, the Maripolsa coleus and fiber optic grass." Those plants were delivered to the stadium the first week of May.
One of their more challenging deliveries is a plant sale fund raiser at Visitation School in Kansas City held in late April. For that delivery eight hours is spent the day before loading 4,000 flats and 8,800 plant baskets into four rented trucks. They leave at 4 a.m. to unload at 6:30 a.m. "That is when we call in the reinforcements, brothers, nephews, in-laws all help," said Julie.
A growing Hurst Greenery has brought the family closer together. The Hurst’s youngest of three children, Ben, is attending law school and plans running his own business. The partnership with the Harms has worked well for the entire family. Lee says she eventually wanted to come back to the farm business after she was married. She met Ryan after college and both worked at a garden center in Columbia.
"A guy driving for dad quit. Dad called me up and said, ‘Are you going to marry Ryan or not? I need somebody to drive the trailer,’" says Lee. The young couple now have two small children that go on deliveries and enjoy the farm.
Both Blake and Ryan also farm row crops with the larger Hurst family farm operation that includes Blake’s dad, Charles, brothers Kevin and Brooks and a nephew. The slow time for the nursery is during the fall harvest when Blake and Ryan can be found combining and driving grain trucks. That is the time Julie and Lee start calling clients to line up next year’s plant orders.
Julie compares it to a family dairy. "You have to be there every day. The weather is a worry. Having a multi-family operation means Lee and Ryan can take vacations and when we are gone we have them to make sure things are taken care of."
Keeping the niche of quality service the Hursts have developed will keep customers coming back for more flowers that end up in flower gardens across the Midwest.