/ 01
The question
The per-acre answers you'll find.
What does a flower farm make per acre? I typed it too, sitting at the kitchen table with a seed catalogue and a calculator, trying to work out whether this could be a living.
Search that question and you will find figures ranging from twenty-five thousand to well into six figures, per acre, per year. None of them are exactly lying. Cut flowers really are one of the highest-value crops you can grow on a small piece of ground; that part of the promise is true. The problem is that every one of those numbers is an average smeared across an entire farm: the beds that flew and the beds that failed, the paths, the propagation tunnel, the corner where the dahlias drowned in June, the month nothing got picked because the wedding season ate the team. An average that wide can convince you of anything, and it cannot help you make a single decision.
And almost nobody growing cut flowers at our scale farms an acre of them anyway. Most of us are working half an acre, a walled garden, a couple of polytunnels and some field beds. The acre is a unit borrowed from arable farming, and it answers a question we are not actually asking.
You do not plant an acre. You plant a bed. So that is where the maths should live.
/ 02
The worked example
One bed of dahlias, every assumption shown.
The unit I actually plan with: one growing bed, ten metres long and 1.2 wide, near enough the classic 30-foot by 4-foot market garden bed.
Three rows of dahlias at 40 centimetre spacing is 75 plants. What follows is a worked example, not a promise: the point is that every number is visible, so you can argue with each one and put in your own.
| Plants (3 rows, 40cm spacing) | 75 tubers |
| Tubers at £3.50 each | £262 |
| Compost and amendments | £45 |
| Support netting and drip, this bed's share | £35 |
| Direct costs, year one | £342 |
| Productive window (late July to first frost) | ≈ 11 weeks |
| Honest cutting average, 1.5 stems per plant per week | ≈ 1,200 stems |
| Sold wholesale at 70p a stem | £840 |
| Contribution, year one | ≈ £500 |
Two things about those numbers. The cutting average is deliberately modest: a good week in September you will beat it easily, and a wet fortnight in August you will not, and 1.5 stems per plant per week across the whole season is what survives contact with a real diary. The price is a trade price; if you sell bouquets at the gate or do weddings, your number is higher and your labour is too. US growers: dahlias wholesale at roughly $1.25 to $2 a stem depending on region and variety, so run the same sums with your price and the shape holds.
And year two is kinder. Tubers split, so the biggest cost roughly halves, and the same bed's contribution climbs toward £670 without you doing anything except not killing them over winter.
/ 03
The comparison
The same bed, planted with cosmos.
Now the comparison that changed how I plant. Same bed, same season, but sown with cosmos: a packet habit rather than a tuber habit.
| Seed, two successional sowings | £8 |
| Compost, netting, drip share | £70 |
| Plants (3 rows, 30cm spacing) | ≈ 90 |
| Productive window (July to frost, resown) | ≈ 14 weeks |
| Cutting average, 1.8 stems per plant per week | ≈ 2,250 stems |
| Sold wholesale at 35p a stem | £790 |
| Contribution, year one | ≈ £715 |
The glamour crop lost. Not by a mile, and a dahlia bed pays other rents, weddings want dinner plates, not daisies. But stem for stem, week for week, the cheap and cheerful bed out-earned the expensive one in year one, and I only know that because I counted per bed instead of guessing per acre.
/ 04
The real number
Contribution per bed-week.
A bed does not just cost money. It costs time occupied.
The dahlias held their bed from mid-May planting to the October clear-up, about 24 weeks, for £500 of contribution: call it £21 per bed-week. The cosmos occupied about 22 weeks for £715: £32 per bed-week. That is the number I now plan the whole farm around, contribution per bed per week occupied, because it is the one that answers real questions. Is the bed of ranunculus that sits there all winter earning its keep? Should the tunnel grow one more succession of stocks or get the sweet peas in early? Per-acre averages shrug at those questions. Per bed-week answers them.
/ 05
Counting it
How you actually collect these numbers.
The maths above needs exactly one piece of data you probably are not collecting: how many stems actually left each bed.
Everything else, costs, spacing, prices, you already know or can look up. Stems cut per bed is the number that turns guessing into knowing, and it has to be counted in the field, at 5am, with wet hands, which is exactly why almost nobody has it.
A notebook in a dry pocket genuinely works, one line per picking round: date, bed, variety, count. If you would rather have the adding-up done for you, our free crop planning spreadsheet has the profit-per-bed sheet from this article built in, with the formulas ready for your own numbers. No email address, just take it.
And if you want the counting itself done standing in the bed, that is the exact itch BloomOS was built to scratch: you log each cut on your phone as you pick, it keeps working when the signal drops, and at the end of the season it hands you contribution per bed without a single evening of data entry. That feature exists because of this exact spreadsheet, and the kitchen-table calculator, and the question I typed into a search box like everyone else.
One honest footnote: nothing above pays you a wage. Labour is the biggest number on a flower farm and the hardest to see, and it deserves its own piece, which is next.
From the field
Know what every bed earned this season.
BloomOS turns the cuts you log in the field into contribution per bed, automatically. Free to start, built by a flower farmer, and recruiting a small founding cohort now.