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April 17th @ 8:00 PM
Analytics for Cut Flower Farmers
with Gretchen Langston
USU Small Farms
USU Small Farms features a cut flower program for research, teaching, and extension. Our research focuses on tailoring cut flower production to Utah growing conditions, as well as testing environmentally responsible farming practices. We teach our students through hands-on farm internships and host outreach events to share our findings across the Intermountain West. Our flowers are primarily sold to Utah florists, and we use these sales to support our students and study the local cut flower market.
The USU Small Farms team consists of graduate students, undergraduate students, and me (Melanie Stock, USU faculty). Special acknowledgement goes to Maegen Lewis, my MS student with the biggest passion for cut flowers, and the person who deserves all the credit for managing the day-to-day needs at our farm, including undergraduate student training and sales.
We specialized in peony, snapdragons, stock, lisianthus, dahlias, zinnias, celosia, foxglove, and delphinium. Our cut flower trials are established in North Logan at the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station – Greenville Farm, and we also collaborate on trials with growers across the Wasatch Front. Most of our flowers are sold through Florage Flower Farm Co-op.
We Offer Flowers Through:
Wholesale
Please email Melanie Stock if you are interested in purchasing USU Flowers.
Melanie Stock
Hi, my name is Melanie Stock and I run USU Small Farms with my team of graduate and undergraduate students. I’m a soil scientist and my role at Utah State is to develop and run a research and extension program that supports smaller scale farmers. I quickly learned about the amazing development of cut flower farms across the state – and also the lack of (research-based) information for growing cut flowers in our area. It was an easy decision to focus my work on cut flower production.
I got into farming in a roundabout way. I loved gardening with my Dad for as long as I can remember. We lived in the city, so I was pretty removed from farming, but I ended up snagging a sweet landscaping job in high school and college that allowed me to work with plants in a new way. Later on, I became a chemist, but my love for plants never went away. I realized being a soil scientist would be a perfect and practical way to combine my interests in plants and chemistry (and later physics). I felt like I met the rest of my professional life during my PhD though: I started studying agriculture (because of my advisor) and running a community garden on the side (because of my love of food and people). After these two experiences, I knew I wanted to stay in agriculture and work with smaller scale farmers. Now I have my dream job at USU and love conducting agricultural research with my students - in the name of cut flowers - and work with cut flower farmers across our region.