Glenda Pereira: 00:18
Welcome to the Maine Farmcast. This is your host, Dr. Glenda Pereira, an assistant extension professor and area specialist for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, as well as an Assistant Professor within the School of Food and Agriculture. On today’s episode, we have a return guest, Dr. Ankit Singh.
Ankit Singh: 00:38
Thank you so much for having me. It’s so nice to be back. We had our sixth Flowering in the North conference on January 21 and 22, and it was so exciting to put it together. So when I started this job, it began with an official requirement that I was the leader of this conference and I thought, oh my God.
Glenda Pereira: 00:59
What a huge undertaking.
Ankit Singh: 01:00
No one teaches you party planning in graduate school, but I have to say, as with my experience in Maine, everyone has been just so kind and supportive. So we put together a list, a committee, we gathered the flower growers, we had a Flowering in the North social where we basically gathered feedback from past attendees on what they wanted. And with an overwhelming, resounding majority, everybody wanted it to be in person. So I figured, okay, I guess Portland, which is where I live, is going to be the venue because in the past it’s been held in Portland. Most flower farmers tend to be focused around the Portland area because they have quick accessibility to Boston.
Ankit Singh: 01:49
Yep. And Boston is where the people are willing to spend the money on flowers, especially for weddings. They come up to Maine because Maine’s a wedding destination. Yeah. God, I hope I get married in Maine.
Ankit Singh: 02:01
It’s such a beautiful place to be wedded in.
Glenda Pereira: 02:03
Yeah. And you’ve got all the connections now with the flower farmers. I know. I mean
Ankit Singh: 02:07
I doubt I’ll get a discount, but it’ll be nice to recognize who is supplying the flowers because I now have a personal relationship with all of them.
Glenda Pereira: 02:15
Yep. And so tell me more, like, how many people attended?
Ankit Singh: 02:20
Putting together 2025 was incredible. We had close to 300 people, and we actually had more people than we had capacity for. And it goes to show just how accommodating flower farmers are. We all squeezed in to listen about topics that we were very passionate about. I found that people learned a lot.
Ankit Singh: 02:45
There was a social hour, a happy hour event, we had yoga, we had mini sessions, which were basically informal sessions where people got into their affinity groups like mothers who are running single-operating entities, or if you’re running everything from a greenhouse or a small hoop house. So the knowledge was catered to beginning growers, advanced growers, small growers, big growers, and I’m very grateful for how it all went. And we are putting together the conference for 2026.
Glenda Pereira: 03:19
And what was the schedule like? I guess, tell me about your favorite educational session you attended.
Ankit Singh: 03:30
The favorite educational session that I attended, I’m a little boring. I like the pest management one. It’s also for two reasons. One, it was presented by my friend and colleague, Dr. Alicyn Smart, and she spoke about the resources flower farmers can use to get their flowers inspected. I’ve been to many conferences, and this is the first conference that I’ve been to that every single person was just so engaged.
Ankit Singh: 03:55
I was very impressed. Yeah. It goes to show just how passionate people are, which actually brings me to what motivated me to put the Flowering in the North together and make this an annual conference. We had people from Utah, from Idaho, from Minnesota, from Washington State, from Canada. Yeah.
Ankit Singh: 04:15
There is this demand for a sense of organization, and I truly believe, and I said this at the opening ceremony, this flowering movement is a force of nature that’s only going to grow. And I’m so grateful to be in the position to try to get this together.
Glenda Pereira: 04:31
Yeah. And certainly, you know, I think growing things in a northern climate creates a challenge in its own right. And we have a short growing season in all of those states. Right? I lived in Minnesota, and our growing season was very short.
Glenda Pereira: 04:45
Our growing season in Maine is even more variable because we have these frosts and thaws, and I’m sure that all impacts
Ankit Singh: 04:52
Oh, absolutely.
Glenda Pereira: 04:53
like flower production here. And so folks want that knowledge or research that you offer at the conference.
Ankit Singh: 05:00
And just to give you a little bit of a background as to what to expect next year, I conducted a needs assessment. As I got to interview people, I learned that there is an increased demand for local flowers, which adds up to what we expect general trends in New England. We find that there is growth in agritourism. Flower farms have been leveraging that, and they offer cutting workshops, U-pick experiences, and farming tours. And there are strong local and regional networks such as the ASCFG where you can share resources. UMaine Extension, the Flowering in the North, is trying to do that too. And there is a strong supportive community and consumer trends that enhance flower sales through direct-to-consumer channels. With opportunities for diversification, we find that diversification into niche markets such as dried flowers, edible flowers, and specialty blooms has allowed people to generate more revenue streams. And also, growing interest in unique and heirloom varieties meeting demand for customized floral arrangements and a focus on sustainability. So, in being able to utilize fewer pesticides, organic soil amendments, and low-waste farming methods, I found that there is great opportunity, and with rising participation from new farmers, most of the farms that I visited tended to be women-led flower farms that are young, and it’s a large, growing sector.
Ankit Singh: 06:36
And due to cost-share programs from the NRCS, we find that greenhouses and irrigation are easier to access, and that has allowed for growing more during the shoulder season.
Glenda Pereira: 06:48
When you were talking about something earlier, so you said that there was a session that was, like, super well attended, and it was about tulips. Yes. So tell us more, like, why do you think that session was so well attended? And are flower farmers and growers in the state of Maine potentially seeing an economic advantage to growing tulips?
Ankit Singh: 07:09
Oh, absolutely. There are many, many flowers that generate a large amount of money. Topics such as getting tulips ready for harvest were very well attended because people wanted to learn from other flower farmers. Most of the speakers at the Flowering in the North were not professors. They were their fellow peers.
Ankit Singh: 07:33
They were flower farmers we identified as people who are doing very well in their field, and they came and they spoke. And that’s what I love about this conference. It’s highly democratic. It’s not this top-down approach with some academics in ivory towers. It’s farmers who grow and grow successfully who are excited to share the resources and techniques to other flower growers who are interested.
Glenda Pereira: 07:55
Yeah. And give us a sort of an idea of the landscape in the state of Maine. What do folks grow here? What’s some of the common flowers that we know that they grow?
Ankit Singh: 08:09
I’ve definitely found that in the flower farms that I visited, a lot of them, they tend to grow anemones, and then lilies and tulips. And it depends because I went to one where I saw marigolds, and I was thinking, isn’t that grown in India? Because I grew up in Goa. And I was told, oh, yeah. It’s for a wedding.
Ankit Singh: 08:31
So a lot of this is for the wedding industry, and it depends on what the bride and groom or the spouses want. So they tend to grow according to order, and they strategically plan it. So a lot of this flower industry is driven by weddings, and these are often made to order. It’s not that a lot of them do grow and leave it at the flower stand for bouquets, but more often than not, especially the bigger players that are really in it for the serious long run making money, do it on an order basis for weddings. Yeah.
Ankit Singh: 09:00
And they grow as to what the client wants. And in a greenhouse, you can do that because you have the ability to alter the climate and do what’s necessary.
Glenda Pereira: 09:08
Right. If you had to estimate, and maybe you know this number, how many flower farmers growing in the state of Maine and what’s acreage?
Ankit Singh: 09:18
That’s a very good question. So when it comes to the exact number of flower farmers, the USDA Census doesn’t have a clear number. But I can tell you that when it comes to the acreage, it’s very small. Yep. Most people are able to get their year’s worth of supply for their income and everything from just two rows of greenhouses. That’s half an acre, just because it’s so highly concentrated and the margins tend to be much higher in flowers.
Glenda Pereira: 09:46
Yeah. No. That’s you you know, I’m sure as you grow in your relationship with these folks, you’ll have a better idea of these farms. So coming back to the Flowering in the North, was there another topic area like the tulip one where folks really, really, like, said, I want to attend this because it’s such a need in my community?
Ankit Singh: 10:08
People really, really wanted to hear about small business management, navigating loans, navigating grants and infrastructure, and also the technical aspects of managing greenhouses. So I’ll be more intentional about making sure we have programming from there too. Because there are knowledge gaps in postharvest logistics, along with demographic challenges because of the aging farmer population, and IPM. The last but not the least was the technology adoption. I found that there is great potential for Extension to be involved, and we as Extension are here to help growers get to where they want with the resources that we have, and putting this conference together has been very fulfilling because it allows for flower growers.
Ankit Singh: 11:02
I see so many young people, just the youth. It impressed me so much because we constantly get told about the average farming age being fairly old, around 59 or 60. And I found that half the people who attended the Flowering in the North were in the 25 to 40 age range. Yeah. The diversity, it was just phenomenal of an experience.
Glenda Pereira: 11:26
This was fantastic, and I’m looking forward to having you back. You know, we haven’t covered the greenhouse tech and your potential water testing and NASA project that you have going on. So we have so much more to learn from you.
Ankit Singh: 11:41
Yeah. I’m excited to share that. Thank you so much once again.
Glenda Pereira: 11:46
For questions, comments, or if you have episode suggestions, please reach out to extension.farmcast@maine.edu.