Business experts are usually gloomy when predicting the likelihood of success in starting a small business. According to Dun & Bradstreet, a business with fewer than 20 employees has only a 9% chance of surviving 10 years. A study in the Journal of Small Business Management was more optimistic, reporting that 64.2% of small businesses failed in a 10-year period.
I was thinking of those statistics as I wrote the article on page 15 about the Sunnydale Peony Farm in Valley Center, Kansas. I first visited Sunnydale 10 years ago, when I was writing my book The Flower Farmer. I included profiles of various types of small businesses in the book, and when it was completed, I had featured 13 flower farms.
This year, I’m beginning a revision of The Flower Farmer so I have been checking up on the farms I profiled in 1997. Sunnydale is still alive and well , 50 years into the flower business. That’s one profile I won’t have to write out of the revision.
In fact, two-thirds of the farms in the original book are still going strong. The Arnoskys, who write the GFM flower column most months, are obviously still growing flowers in a big way. The Pendletons, who farm near me, keep expanding their business. One grower retired to Hawaii, but sold his business and it’s still going under new ownership. Several of the other farms have changed focus somewhat, but are still producing flowers.
This is purely anecdotal, and a very small sample, but I suspect that in general small farms have a greater survival rate than small businesses overall. Perhaps that’s because they are such a big investment that no one walks away from them easily. Or maybe it’s because the work is so satisfying that people don’t give up quickly when faced with adversity. Whatever the reason, I hope it proves true that many of our small farms are here to stay.

The Pendletons, whom I just mentioned, were hit hard by a storm in March. (It missed us altogether.) It was amazing the amount of damage that was caused by what meteorologists are calling a microburst. Two silos collapsed and several buildings were blown apart. Their farm looked like a bomb hit it. Luckily, their house was untouched and no one was hurt. You can see some amazing photos of the damage at their web site, www.pendletons.com.
Perhaps even more interesting than the damage itself, though, was the response of the community. Hundreds of people showed up the first week after the storm to help with cleanup. It was a testament to the goodwill the family has built up over a long career growing food and flowers for local markets. Never doubt that people hold their farmers in high esteem.

We had a call from a reader who wanted to talk about Namenia, a spring green she said was popular in Great Britain but was apparently unavailable in North America. I did a little research and found a photo of Namenia, also known as leaf turnip. Never having heard of it myself, I emailed Frank Morton, proprietor of Wild Garden Seed, who breeds and sells seed of all kinds of unusual salad greens.
“Never heard of ‘Namenia,’ but on the other hand “leaf turnip” is a pretty generic description that might include a lot of “Asian Greens”, including Mizuna, Tatsoi, Mizspoona, and other Brassica rapa, which includes turnips of all types.
“So my question back would be–Is this a Brassica rapa? Does “Namenia” refer to a varietal name of B. rapa, or is it a different species altogether? What color are its flowers? Yellow, white, or purple? I ask because I’ve recently been alerted to a new food species from China that is in the Brassica Family, but is a whole ‘nother genus from our familiar turnip relatives…big violet flowers follow the “raabesque” food shoots. I’ve also seen “radish greens” lately–something that could easily be misnamed as turnip rooted something.”
Some days I think I know so much, and other days I think I’ve barely scratched the surface of the body of knowledge surrounding farming. If you know of Namenia, let me know.