In a bid to encourage Australians to buy locally grown flowers, a young entrepreneur in western Victoria has designed a digital marketplace to connect producers with the local market.
Nikki Davey runs a flower farm at Glenmore, 70 kilometres west of Melbourne, growing perennial wildflowers, natives, and a juvenile truffle orchard.
But not all flowers available for purchase are grown on local farms like Ms Davey's.
More than half of the flowers available on the Australian market are imported, and to educate consumers Ms Davey created the digital marketplace "Grown Not Flown".
The invention, which supports the "slow flower movement" by connecting flower consumers with local and sustainable producers, won Ms Davey Victoria's 2023 AgriFutures Rural Women's Award.
Grown Not Flown
Ms Davey said the global platform made it easier to search, source, and connect with local producers and, since being awarded in April, the business growth had been fast-tracked.
"Prior to our platform, in Australia if you wanted to buy locally grown flowers you'd have to do a lot of research and use social media to identify and find those," she said.
"We currently have over 1,000 flower farms listed and users in 30 countries, which is absolutely wild."
"It's really exciting, the growth within the platform has really blown us away."
The app was also beneficial to the many local small-scale producers who made up the Victorian flower industry, Ms Davey said, in addition to encouraging consumers to shop local.
"One of the main things we wanted to do was to remove the need for micro and small-scale growers to have to build and manage their own websites," she said.
"It's a flower-farmer-led initiative, so they need to sign up to be listed on our global map.
"We wanted to help those growers streamline their business operations and manage and collect their own data."
The digital marketplace is free to use for both consumers and producers.
"We needed to make it accessible and easy to use. We really wanted to gear it towards those micro and small-scale growers," Ms Davey said.
"A lot of the ag-tech available is geared towards commercial and industry producers and it's usually quite expensive."
Investing in the future
The young entrepreneur's flower farm in Glenmore is not a typical landscape.
"When people come to visit the farm, I always like to preface it with: 'It's not going to be as pretty as you'd expect,'" she said.
"We've got really vast fields full of trees, that just look like little shrubs at the moment."
The farm is expected to deliver its first full harvest of wildflowers this year.
"That will still be quite sporadic, so it will probably be another three to five years before we'll start to see a consistent supply of those flowers," Ms Davey said.
"For the truffles, it's an even longer journey — they've been in the ground now for two and a half years.
"You don't expect to receive truffles for three to five years and then they'll double year on year, but won't hit maturity until 10 or 15 years."
Ms Davey said although the farm was a long-term investment, having a diverse income stream in the future was important.
"I think for us to get to where we really want to be for the future, it might be wishful thinking three to five years, but more likely 10 to 15," she said.
"We'd really like to supply the local market, another reason we created Grown Not Flown.
"We'll look to do a roadside stall as well, potentially some farmers' markets, and also have people come to the farm for an experience and pick the flowers themselves."
