Which state has the biggest nursery & greenhouse share? 🌷

Rhode Island — 55.3 % of farm sales. More than half of everything Rhode Island’s farms sold in 2022 came from nursery, greenhouse, flower and sod crops. For the whole country the share is 3.9%, so Rhode Island’s is more than 14 times the national one. Connecticut is second at 51.5% and New Jersey third at 48.8%; the next state down, Florida, is well back at 34.0%. Now the careful part: this is a share, not an amount. The state that sold the most of these crops in dollars is California — more than 70 times Rhode Island’s total — and in that dollar ranking Rhode Island is only 40th. A share can get big in two ways: the part can be big, or the whole can be small. Rhode Island’s whole is small — its farms together sold less than any other state’s except Alaska’s. So this table is not saying Rhode Island grows the most flowers. It is saying that when you look at what Rhode Island’s farms sell, this one family of crops — the whole group described just below, not only flowers — is more than half of it. What goes into this family? USDA’s census appendix describes the section as sales of “aquatic plants, floriculture and bedding crops, nursery crops, sod, propagative materials, food crops grown under protection, and mushroom crops” — so a greenhouse tomato and a mushroom sit next to a rosebush and a roll of lawn. Sod comes with a Rhode Island story: a 2021 ecoRI News report, citing Michael Sullivan, professor emeritus at the University of Rhode Island, reports that sod farms in the state had grown potatoes in the 1950s before they switched to sod. That is one crop and one person’s account. Why this state ends up on top, none of these sources says, and neither does this quiz. Biscuit’s Field Note is about the building behind many of these plants: a glass house, and the wind that tries to empty it.