Sustainable floriculture practices and certification: Growers' barriers to adoption.

摘要

Floriculture crop production is input intensive and requires the use of some nonrenewable and petroleum based products to make the crop uniform and of consistent high quality (Krug et al., 2008; Lopez et al., 2008). These petroleum based products may cause a greenhouse operation to negatively affect the environment due to landfill waste and water and chemical pollution, etc. (Krug et al., 2008; Stewart, 2007). Two certification programs emerged allowing growers to be certified as a sustainable floriculture operation. Due to floriculture sustainability and its certification being a relatively new phenomenon, peer reviewed research on this topic is non-existent.;The purpose of this study is to identify the segment of growers most likely to adopt sustainable floriculture production practices; identify factors affecting grower's willingness to adopt sustainable practices, and the barriers to adopting sustainable floriculture certification. One hundred and twelve surveys were collected from the nationwide survey of floriculture growers. A binary logistic regression was used to examine the factors affecting growers' adoption of sustainable practices and barriers to adoption of sustainable floriculture certification. In this study, the grower most likely to adopt sustainable practices is located in the Midwest, has one to five acres devoted to floriculture production, and exhibits positive attitudes towards the environment and sustainability. Factors that affected the adoption of sustainable practices included growers' concern about the ease of implementation and the production risk perceived by growers. The barriers to adoption of sustainable floriculture certification were the perception of sustainable practices as risky and not able to generate additional profits for the operation. Growers who have retailers, landscapers, farmers markets, independent garden centers, and other small venues as customers are less likely to be interested in certification. However, objective industry research about certification and profitability would positively influence the interest in certification.