The nursery industry is facing tough times

Niklas' annual sales plummeted to under $2 million. He hasn't found a commercial lender to help him refinance.

He and other nursery owners worry that two tax measures passed by Oregon voters earlier this year — raising the state income tax on upper-income individuals, and hiking the corporate minimum tax and taxes on corporate net income greater than $10 million — will push them closer to the financial edge.

"If the financial system doesn't get fixed, it's going to be extremely hard for agriculture to get back on its feet," Niklas says.

David Van Essen, whose Van Essen Nursery in the community of Lebanon is one of the largest container growers in the state, had never seen such a precipitous swing. The 300-acre nursery had to cut back. About 35 full-time employees were laid off.

Like many others, Mr. Van Essen had to become more efficient.

"This is a benchmark year," Van Essen says. "If things continue to decline, it's going to be very difficult to weather this storm. We can only withstand so many years of down sales."

Growers also are having a hard time finding loans.

"It's a very tough lending environment for a nursery," says John Aguirre, executive director of the Oregon Association of Nurseries. "In most typical downturns, things would have been fine. But given the severity of this, where banks have been quite aggressive, even brutal in their response, people just can't refinance."

A few Oregon nurseries have gone bankrupt. More have quietly gone out of business.

Not all is gloom. Nurseries that specialized in edibles — vegetables, fruit trees, and berries — didn't fall as far thanks to the interest in grow-your-own food. Nurseries that produce native and drought-tolerant plants for restoration work also have fared better.

J. Frank Schmidt & Son, which sells about 1.2 million trees yearly, saw its sales fall about 10 percent. It has laid off workers and cut back production. But the company's cooler warehouse in Boring is full of trees bundled for shipment. Crews are busy grafting, trimming roots, and branches, caring for cuttings.

"We're down to the bare bones," says Nancy Buley, a spokeswoman for the company. "But we're excited for the recovery — it's going to come. Nothing happens very quickly in the tree business. It will probably take us longer to recover. But we've seen some bright spots already."

Niklas and his Clackamas Greenhouses are equally resilient.

"I'm a farmer," he says. "I have to have optimism."

Editor’s note: For more Monitor gardening, see our main gardening page and posts of our blog, Diggin' It [keep scrolling down]. Both of these have new URLs, so we hope you'll bookmark them and return. Want to be notified when there's something new in our gardening section? Sign up for our RSS feed.

Previous

1 | 2