[trees]

Okay, here's the situation. I'm working with a software company to try and come up with a fairly simple way to apply costs to growing-out stock. I've done a fair amount of research, but it seems that no one has really come up with a straight forward way of doing this. It's a highly complex issue, so looking for something that doesn't involve lengthy proprietary research would be a real benefit to garden centers that grow their own stock. I think I'm coming close to some sort of resolution, but I'd like a little input on this.

For those of you that have nurseries and grow your own stock, how do you deal with the cost issue? There's a lot that goes into assigning cost... pine bark, fertilizer, organic elements, pre-emerge, container, watering, labor to pot, move, etc. overhead for it to sit in one place until it's finished off and sold. Then, if it gets potted up, how do you assign a cost to that new size? One-gallon equivalents or a % markup?

I probably won't get a lot of response to this thread, but this is a big issue. It's the one piece of information that is largely unavailable to the smaller grower. There are expensive software packages that do this for the big growers, but for a mom&pop place that has a garden center, landscape crew & growing operation, it's just not something they can easily track. Getting a handle on this number would be a big plus. Let me know if you have any ideas.

Thanks

[HardDaysKnight]

I did some research on it for you and will try more later.
Hope these 2 links help you out somewhat.
http://www.plantexpert.com/PlantExpert.com_FAQ.htm

http://www.coenosium.com/text800/start_nursery.htm

[Mac]

I would suggest you talk to an (your) accountant. While I have never been in an accounting firm, I doubt this sort of "case" would cost too terribly much. To approach this, you need to know your inputs and how much product that will result in.

[Dale Wiley]

Production agriculture at its best.

It can be as complicated ad you make it. You have a group of inputs that are required to have value added to get the final , saleable product.

Inventory control, input costing, its kind of a pain. We have just re organized our nursery, and focused on a grouping of plants, with very simliar inputs.

In the nursery business, market prices determine how much you can get from your product, therefore efficency of production and cost control determine net profit. As with most business, a fixed overhead lowers on a per unit basis. Direct costs increase on a per unit basis.

It is a totally different business form landscape contracting, and cannot be operated the same.

I would be very interested in anything you develop in that way.

[Lanelle]

The ANLA has a research organization that does that sort of thing and is involved in developing automated systems to decrease growing costs. Europe is ahead of us on that score. Their headquarters are in DC.

[trees]

So far I have had discussions with the ANLA, several nursery consultants, PhDs that specialize in agricultural business management and a few big wholesalers. There is no clear concensus on a way to do this and make it fairly intuitive. Most smaller growers would agree that it's not that important to get their costs down to the penny, but having a "good enough" picture of their operation would be a huge benefit.

Here's a link for the kind of thing I'm looking to develop. It's a journal article for cost accounting of a rare/native plant growing operation therefore the costs of production are higher so it would have to be altered to fit into the nursery/garden center environment, but I think it's a really good start.

http://www.mt.nrcs.usda.gov/technica...rserycost.html

If you're interested and have any insight, I'd love to hear it. This is a really big issue with the box stores really driving the price of nursery stock down. For independant small growers/nurseries to stay competitive they really need to get a handle on their costs.

Like I said, I think I'm getting close. I'm meeting with several people from The Garden Center Group this weekend in Atlanta and will discuss this. I'll post here when I know more & thanks in advance for any help...

[Turtle]

This might help it was a nursery business analysis for nurseries in florida A little outdated but the worksheets at the end might be of some use

http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/FE014#TABLE_21

[trees]

Well, this topic has been taking up a large amount of my free brain space (which isn't too much) over the last couple months, but I have come up with a pretty good Excel spreadsheet to track growing costs. It's not perfect as it gets a few average cost so as not to bog the whole thing down and therefore take WAY too much time to keep up with, but I think it gives a pretty good estimate.

I'm having a software developer look into the feasibility of incorporating this somehow into a business management (P.O.S.) package, which would be a real coup, because there is no one out there providing this for retail growers. I think it's going to get done.

Anyway, if anyone's interested, I'll be happy to share, just PM me with your email address and I'll send it off. It's got a few quirks that are needed for integrating into the other software, but should be TOTALLY useable anyway.

[plantbroker]

You can find business plans for nurseries on the websites of just about any major university. I once created a business plan for a 100 acre container operation and decided that there are many ways to run a nursery. I can dig up the budget if you need it.
But....it is deep in a long forgotten box...You should be able to get the info you need easily enough. Let me know if I can help.

[Dale Wiley]

Jess sent me what he has and I have looked at it, and it is great, in its simplicity.

As you look at it though, one thing you will notice is that there needs to be an operation and production plan to go with this tracking software.

The basis of the software is tracking a "lot" of plant materials from inception through production and sale. This is going to need an identification method starting when the plant material is pulled from propagation or buy in stage, and placed into growing production.

I am think this will need to be bar code of some type to ID the lot and record and track the growing and production function associated with than "lot". Mortality would have to be tracked, thus increasing the production cost of that lot. Being able to assign a labor element to the lot would have to be inserted in prodution somewhere, to keep tracking simplier, instead of tracking labor every time some body touchs the plant.

The reason I am thinking bar code would be to keep data entry down, and not makethe process to cumbersome to be of good benifit.

[trees]

Dale-

Thanks for the feedback. As with anything technology related, there need to be operational systems in place to take full advantage. Crap in, crap out, so to speak. So, yes, planning and tracking have to be a part of the equation.

You're right about barcoding the plants and imbedding the lot# in the barcode somehow, too. Like I said, this was developed with interfacing to a POS program in mind, and most good POS programs should be able to handle that.

I designed it so that you could go as in detail with labor as you want, either assign one number to cover the whole time, or track each time you deal with the plants. Obviously, the more detail you put in, the more accurate the number will be.

I'm glad you like it and think it's fairly straigtforward. That was the intention.

[ALS]

Jesse I got the program, but have not had much time to mess with it. I will give you some feedback when i have played with it some more. Thanks again

Ted