Take a good look at those young flowers that you brought home from the garden center and carefully transplanted into the garden.
They don’t look like manufactured products, do they?
But they are. And many of them probably were built on an 11-acre site along the Colorado River east of Palisade. Each year, Palisade Greenhouse churns out about 3,000 different product lines supplying hundreds of grocery store chains, landscapers, and garden centers throughout the intermountain West.
“Essentially it’s like any other production facility,” says Mark Anema, chief financial officer for Palisade Greenhouse. “You’re taking raw materials and putting them together for an end product.”
Palisade Greenhouse has been owned since 1977 by Tom and Carolyn McKee, and the general manager is their son, Brad McKee. The operation is a wholesale grower and supplier; it grows and sells its products only to retailers, who sell the end products to consumers. In other words, you can’t buy plants from Palisade Greenhouse, but the garden center where you buy your yard supplies can.
Converting soil, seeds, water, and sunshine into finished products that consumers want to buy – and timing the products so that they are ready precisely when those warm spring weekends invite gardeners to part with their hard-earned dollars at their local garden center – is a constant challenge, Anema says.
An added pressure is to keep up with trends in plant development and the ever-changing tastes of landscape designers and gardeners.
“Hopefully we come up with things our customers like, and their customers like in turn,” Anema says. “It’s always a challenge trying to determine what our production is going to be the coming year.”
For Palisade Greenhouse, a lot rides on getting the right plants to the right places at the right time. Anema says more than 90 percent of the company’s revenue comes in during April, May, June, and July.
On its 11 acres, Palisade Greenhouse has about 100,000 square feet in greenhouses that are an oasis of color in late winter when the landscape outside is cold and brown. The operation has three divisions: one for annuals (plants that must be replanted each year), a perennial division (plants that survive year after year), and a small-plants division that produces seedling “plugs” that are sold to other commercial greenhouses.
Anema says he is particularly proud of a computerized inventory system that tracks tens of thousands of plants at any given time. The computerized system helps the greenhouse develop an inventory that appeals to the widest number of customers. For example, blooming plants can be tracked and timed so customers receive plants in exactly the stage of bloom they’re seeking. Customers submit orders online in real time.
“They can order based on bloom stage,” Anema says.
Such production procedures are necessary because greenhouses are a highly competitive business dealing in perishable products, Anema says. Operating such a company successfully requires the perfect blend of sales expertise, customer service, inventory management, high-quality facilities, and product selection.
Palisade Greenhouse works to improve its operations each year, refining the art of growing and selling plants in a region where spring weather is notoriously fickle and can greatly impact operations. Anema says he enjoys the challenge.
“I feel really blessed to be here,” he says. “It’s neat to be able to take some soil and a seed and water and sunshine and see what God does with it. We put it together, and He grows it for us.”
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