20-Year Prospect
The Colombians hit the American flower market back in 1991, and the future of U.S. floriculture has been declining ever since. While you might still be struggling along as a small, "buy local" grower twenty years from now, there's a far better chance that you'll have pulled up your buds and moved on to greener pastures.
It all started, as so many things do nowadays, with a government negotiation. Our government shook hands over a free trade agreement with Colombia and, all of a sudden, the U.S. was awash in inexpensive cut flowers.
Between 1997 and 2001, about sixty percent of the flowers Americans bought were imports, valued at more than $550 million per year. American growers, on the other hand, saw the value of production drop from $472 million in 1997 to $424 million in 2001.
Things have only gotten worse for floriculturists. Today, eighty-two percent of the flowers sold in the U.S. come from south of the border.
The competition has driven many American flower farms out of business: there were more than 500 big floriculturist enterprises in California in 1991 (when the FTA was signed), but by 2012 that number had been cut in half—and not in a pretty, beautiful-bouquet-arrangement kind of way.
California's politicians have been lobbying hard to get consumers to realize that American flowers are made of pure sunshine and awesomeness; they've gone all the way to President Obama with their tale of floricultural woe.
The problem is, when it comes down to a fight between American-grown and super-cheap, guess what most people are going to go with every time? Hint: it ain't the more expensive irises grown in California...which is why floriculture is a career in decline. We'd advise finding another related career if you can stomach it, there are other things you can do with flowers.