Should Flower Farmers Be Using AI?
A Regenerative Farmer’s Honest Answer
It’s 4 in the morning. I’m drinking an Americano at my kitchen table. Outside, Winnie, our Polish Tatra Sheepdog is curled up by the door. My daughter is asleep upstairs. And on the screen in front of me, my morning briefing is already written.
The emails I need to answer are prioritized. The wedding inquiry that came in last night is flagged as a hot lead. My sowing schedule tells me exactly what seeds I need to get in the ground today. My soil data from the last two years is organized so I can see patterns I wouldn’t have caught on my own.
This used to take me an hour every morning. Now it takes 15 minutes. And the hour I get back is the hour I spend outside, in the dirt, with the flowers that are the whole point.
I’ve been using AI on my flower farm for over a year. Up until recently, I’ve only told a handful of people.
Today I want to tell you why.
The Conversation About AI Our Industry Isn’t Having
Every other industry is talking about artificial intelligence right now. Log on to social media and every social media feed is full of ai content. Every news segment is highlighting ai technology. I have looked on Facebook groups, social media, every flower farming space I’m in. I can tell some people are using AI in their businesses. But the conversation doesn’t appear to be happening out in the open.
I think it’s time we had it.
Not because I want to convince you to use AI. Your choice is yours. My goal is to make sure you have enough understanding to make a decision that’s actually yours, not one that was made for you by silence.
What AI Does in a Real Flower Farm Business
I want to be clear. I’m selective about what I use AI for. If I need an image, I go into Canva. I was a photographer for 12 years. I am not generating fake images of flowers that never grew in my field. If I need a dinner recipe, I Google it.
I use AI for the things that can’t be handled as efficiently anywhere else on the internet.
My morning briefing, pulled from five different calendars and sticky notes into one clear view. I find my spreadsheets, analyzed for patterns in soil data. Then, my inbox, sorted so the wedding inquiries don’t get buried under the Pottery Barn and other marketing emails. My sowing schedule, analyzed and calculated against years of my own data and my frost dates. My captions, sparked from ideas I dictate into my phone while I’m cutting flowers.
AI does not dig my dahlias. It does not arrange flowers. I am still the one in control and making decisions. It is not posting anything on social media pretending to be me.
It is helping me be a farmer instead of an administrator.
The Plow Metaphor That Changes Everything
For anyone asking whether a regenerative farmer can use AI without being a hypocrite, I want to offer a metaphor that sits with me.
The plow transformed farming. It made scale possible. It also had consequences for the soil that we did not fully understand for a long time. Those consequences are the reason regenerative agriculture exists as a movement today.
And here is what’s interesting for our industry. Most flower farmers don’t even use a plow. We made that choice. Our fields are small. Our crops are diversified. As flower farmers, we have chosen a different relationship with our soil.
We didn’t make that choice by ignoring the plow. We made that choice by understanding what it does and how it would work, or not work, for our land.
That’s what I want for us with AI. Not blind adoption. Not blind rejection. A choice made by farmers who have paid enough attention to know what we are saying yes to or no to.
Two Things Can Be True at the Same Time
If you are waiting for me to tell you I have figured out the climate math or the ethics math or the employment math, I haven’t.
What I have come to believe is that two things can be true at the same time.
AI can give small farmers time back and the data centers that power it can be threatening watersheds.
AI can help me serve my customers better and it can be trained on work taken from creators without their consent.
I can choose to use this thing and respect the farmers who choose not to.
That isn’t a contradiction I need to resolve before I can act. That’s the honest complexity of the moment we are in.
I live 20 miles from The Dalles, Oregon, where Google’s data centers already use 40 percent of the town’s water. There is a bill in the Senate right now (HR 655) that, if passed, would transfer 150 acres of Mount Hood National Forest to The Dalles to triple their reservoir. The water would come from the Dog River, which feeds my farm and the endangered salmon runs at the bottom of my property.
That contradiction is not comfortable. I live in it every day.
Why Rare Is Going to Matter
Here is a prediction I will stand behind. We are heading into what some people are already calling the sloppy slop summer. Social media flooded with AI-generated content. Avatars that aren’t real. Videos of farms that don’t exist. Captions written by bots trained on other bots.
When everything online sounds the same, the voice that sounds like a real human is going to stand out more than ever.
Your photograph of your actual hand holding an actual stem, your caption you wrote yourself at 9 PM, your weekly newsletter from your kitchen table. Those are going to be rare.
Like a unicorn dahlia. Real. Grown. Cared for. One of a kind. The bloom every flower friend remembers.
Rare is going to matter.
I am not using AI to make more content. I am using AI to free up time so I can make more of what only I can make.
If you would like to hear more of my thoughts about whether or not flower farmers should be using AI, I invite you to listen to the full episode of this conversation.
Listen to the full episode of Should Flower Farmers Be Using AI
You’re Invited To Join Us For A 2 Hour Workshop: AI That Gets You Back in the Dirt
On May 2nd, I’m hosting a workshop called AI That Gets You Back in the Dirt. Two hours. Five tools. Live demos on a real flower farm business. No tech jargon. No rocket ships.
It’s $47 to attend live, or $97 for VIP access which includes the lifetime replay, my Flower Farmer’s AI Prompt Vault with over 50 prompts written for our industry, and my Voice Profile Builder so you can teach AI to protect your voice.
Whether you decide to use AI or not is your decision alone. I respect whichever option you choose. What I do believe is that this is a conversation our industry needs to have. We need a voice at this table. And to have one, we have to understand what we are talking about.
Discover More Episodes of The Backyard Bouquet Podcast
Growing Cut Flowers In A Vineyard
How a female flower farmer in the Columbia Gorge is growing cut flowers in a vineyard and quadrupled the value of every linear foot.
Soil Health for Flower Farmers
A soil agronomist on what’s beneath your feet, why compost isn’t the fix-all for soil health for flower farmers, and the mantra she taught me when my own land needed healing.
Graeme Corbett: Life In Bloom
Graeme Corbett left a TV career in London for a cutting garden in Kent. His story is a roadmap for anyone wondering if a career pivot to flowers is possible.
