2022 Census of Agriculture: U.S. flower farms blossom amid growing traditional outdoor cultivation

With Mother’s Day approaching, many will gift bouquets filled with blooms grown domestically and imported from abroad. Cut flowers and florist greens raised domestically were valued at nearly $763 million in 2022, according to the 2022 Census of Agriculture from USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). About 10,800 commercial farms grew flowers and greens for use by florists that year, increasing by more than 50 percent from the previous census in 2017. Greenhouses and other protected-culture technologies make cultivation feasible in a wide variety of geographic locations and, in 2022, commercial flower farms spanned all 50 States. Growers throughout the country reported more than 158 million square feet of protected-culture flower and green production in 2022—the equivalent of almost 2,750 football fields. Despite the advantages to greenhouse production, growing flowers conventionally is on the rise in the United States. In 2022, more than 31,000 acres of flowers were grown in the open, an increase of 33 percent from the 2017 census. Domestic cut flower sales increased $90 million from the 2017 census, not adjusting for inflation. The value of imported flowers also increased over that time. Cut flower imports were valued at $1.9 billion in 2022, an increase of $783 million from 2017. This chart is based on data from the NASS 2022 Census of Agriculture and draws from the USDA, Economic Research Service Outlook for U.S. Agricultural Trade: February 2024.

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