Company description

26 acre veg and flower farm in Newtown Square PA. THis is our 6th season of CSA, with a 300ish person membership. We attend Bryn Mawr Farmers Market on Saturdays, and sell to local restaurants and wholesale.

We have not hired publicly in a few seasons because we always have a fantastic crew. A lot of folks have worked for us over the years, and we hope they all agree that our primary values are making this a quality job and a quality place to work. It is rewarding to grow healthy produce and feed our community, but we are most beholden to the people who choose to spend their scarce time and energy here. We want a crew of people who like working together and who treat each other right. It has created a rare dynamic that is inclusive and largely without egos, and that is a precious thing that has taken a lot of work. Now we turn our focus from the challenges of starting a farm and growing our crops and markets to sustaining and improving our lives and our business. We hope the right people will join us. This is a very special place to a lot of people for different reasons. We all do our part to make it the best it can be.

Job description

We have been growing flowers for about 8 seasons with no dedicated manager. We are ready for someone to come in and take over the weekly activities - managing a small harvest crew, preparing relatively small amounts of loose stems and arrangements for orders and CSA, preparing relatively larger amounts of bunches and bouquets on Thursdays and/or Fridays for Saturday farmers market. This requires experience on a farm. These core activities take about 2-3 days a week from about late May till November. The ideal applicant would go well beyond this, but that could vary depending upon schedule, preference and interest in other parts of the flower production and sales process, as well as other activities around the farm.

The most important part of this role is exercising judgment managing a part of the farm that can blur between creative work and production work, aesthetics and output. To do a good job harvesting flowers on a Thursday and making them into bouquets on a Friday for sale on a Saturday requires a few things:

Understanding of the crops and how and when to harvest them effectively, time management and sense of urgency to get them stored properly, understanding of vase life and how to prioritize blooms for the best bouquets and the best management of our crops, basic familiarity with pricing and value, and the ability to work deductively to determine formulas for making not just beautiful and high quality bouquets and arrangements, but the right ones to maximize the stems and crops that we have. It really helps to be good at moving flowers around quickly and confidently without breaking too many.

Almost all of us on the farm find this to be a very exciting and rewarding challenge, and a part of the week we all look forward to. We just have a lot of other stuff going on, and nobody here wants to dedicate their time just to this. Flowers have always been second to food and the rigors of the weekly schedule. We’d like someone who wants to put flowers first. If this sounds like something you’d like to dedicate your time to, please apply.

Ideally, whoever we hire as Flower Manager would work at least 5 days a week during the peak of the season, and would want a full-time role on the farm. As mentioned above, this could take different forms depending on qualities, experience and preferences. It would be easy for someone with farming experience to be a member of the production crew while prioritizing flowers. In a longer term sense, the flowers we grow and what we do with them could expand. There is a lot to do in the short-term to prepare for a successful season of flower growing, but the right applicant could be a part of expanding our floral crops and business.

Right now we grow:

Early Spring

Larkspur, Delphinium, Digitalis, Ranunculus, Peonies

Late Spring/ Summer

Snapdragons, Lisianthus, Sunflowers

Late Summer/ Fall

Dahlias, Celosia, Chrysanthemums, Eucalyptus

We bring flowers to about 20-25 Saturday farmers markets a year, most frequently about $1000, call it 25 x $25 bouquets and 15 x $15 bunches, but occasionally we sell more like 70 bouquets and dozens of bunches, when the stars align. We pick up small weddings and DIY bucket orders relatively frequently throughout the season with no specific marketing plan, and sell a handful of arrangements every week with our wholesale vegetable orders. We love growing elegant flowers in the high tunnels. But we struggle to market them at a high price per stem when they come in volume. We love the challenge of creating a beautiful concept for a bouquet that really excites, and then taking that process and breaking it into an assembly line of steps to reproduce many fast and efficiently. But we struggle to create reliable markets for more basic, everyday nice bouquets that could be scaled up effectively. We’re grateful for our supporters at the farmers market and through our CSA, and all customers who come seeking our flowers, but we are ready to move on to the next phase of growing flowers and excited to hire someone to help us get there. There is a lot of potential to grow.

Position could be salary or hourly starting at $20.

Compensation

this position is: hourly, $20/hr +

Application instructions

Deadline

no deadline