Speaker: Lanie Riner, Executive Director, Georgia Green Industry Association
Recorded introduction: Narrated by Bethany Harris
Moderator: Bethany Harris
Duration: 4:06.9 (246.911 s, measured)
Series: Cut Flower Symposium
Webinar Date: July 23, 2026
Recorded Introduction
Prerecorded speaker introduction, narrated by Bethany Harris.
Bethany Harris: Lanie Riner is Executive Director of the Georgia Green Industry Association and co-owner of Thunderwood Farms, a commercial greenhouse in Woodbury. A longtime champion of Georgia’s green industry, she leads professional certification and education efforts and partners closely with the UGA Center for Urban Agriculture. A graduate of UGA’s Advancing Georgia’s Leaders in Agriculture and Forestry program, she’s thrilled to help welcome you this morning and share more about GGIA.
Welcome
Lanie Riner: Good morning everyone. Thank you for being here. I’m really excited about this second Cut Flower Symposium. This is an area for GGIA that we are beginning to engage in and again. Anyway, my name is Lanie Riner. I am the Executive Director and I’m going to tell you just a little bit about GGIA before we get started.
What GGIA Is and Who Belongs to It
GGIA is our state trade association for ornamental and environmental horticulture. We have a broad scope of membership for this sector including wholesale growers, greenhouse growers, retail, landscape firms, irrigation suppliers, allied businesses, public gardens, cut flower producers, and educators.
Formed in 1990
And we’ve been around since 1990. We were formed then as a merger between landscape professionals.
Advocacy, Education, and Student Development
But as GGIA, what we do, we do advocacy for the industry, and that comes in a lot of different forms from public policy engagement at state, local, and federal levels, to regulatory efforts, to helping with things like this, whether that’s student development at 4-H or FFA or education for the industry through programs like GCPP, Cut Flower Symposium, or GCLP.
We just try to make sure that our industry is up to date on all of the latest information and has access to those things.
Cut Flower Growers in GGIA
I mentioned that we do serve cut flower growers. I know a lot of the…a lot of y’all may not know a whole lot about us, but in 2005, the Georgia Flower Growers Association actually merged into GGIA to become the floriculture division of GGIA.
And then, of course, as many of you may know, a lot of our cut flower growers across the state did go out of business during that drought of 2007. But we are so excited about the reemergence of this industry and the number of new growers in this area. And we are excited to partner with y’all.
Shared Concerns Across the Industry
Many of the shared concerns that we have, labor, water, regulatory efforts, plant health, liability, weather, business growth, all of those things. GGIA works on those things now, and we work on those things for our entire industry.
Membership and Southeast Green
I did want to just put in a plug for membership while I was here. Shameless plug. If you are a flower grower, you fall into any of those divisions, you are absolutely welcome to join us. We would love to have you.
Many of those regulatory efforts that we talked about, those are practical benefits of membership and, of course, education and our big Southeast Green Conference and Trade Show, which happens each June.
Website and Contact Information
Rich, did you have that link that you could maybe put in the chat box for everyone?
It’s just got a link to our website and my email address in case there’s anything that I could help you with. I would hope you please reach out.
Closing and Handoff
Again, I just wanted to thank you all for investing your time in this symposium. I think it’s a great opportunity. I’m so grateful for the Center for Urban Agriculture for pulling this together. Extension, everyone who’s had a part in this. This is just fantastic to see education in this area again.
So we want to be helpful where we can. We hope you reach out and thank you for being here today. Bethany, I’ll give it back to you.
Bethany Harris: Perfect. Perfect. And we have dropped in the website that she shared as well as her email.
Transcript processed for UGA Center for Urban Agriculture / Cut Flower Symposium Archives
Source: Corrected SRT (Stage 1), GTBOP_Transcript_2026-07-23_RinerGGIAWelcome.srt (50 blocks)
Updated 2026-08-08 in the post-pipeline correction pass, applying the closed audio verification sweep. Both [VERIFY] markers removed, two words corrected, and the ellipsis at the founding sentence retired now that the sentence is complete. Both completeness proofs re-run against the corrected SRT and clean: normalized character stream identical at 2,886 characters, exact token stream differing only in the single remaining seam repair.