Compared to participants of previous years, we are seeing companies respond who have substantially higher sales. Many smaller firms do not respond because they either have no time to complete the complex form or do not collect this information. Yet, there is a consistent trend reported by USDA statistics where smaller firms account for a smaller percentage of production and an even smaller percentage of total gross bedding plant sales.
Small firms play an important role in the industry, but an increasingly less proportionate one.
Categorizing these businesses by size using gross sales, we saw many larger firms participating this year. Fifty-four percent of the respondents reported their sales for 1999, the year prior to the survey. Most responding firms sold more than one category of plant material. Annual plant sales were reported by 63.8 percent of the participants, perennial sales were reported by 51.4 percent, flowering plant sales were reported by 45.5 percent, and cut flower sales were reported by 12.7 percent. Table 2 shows the mean, median and mode for sales in each category.