Speakers: Jess Neese, co-founder, Atlanta Flower Collective and Field and Flower; Ashley Blackstone, co-founder, Atlanta Flower Collective and Wellspring Farms
Introduced by: Gabrielle LaTora
Moderator: Bethany Harris
Duration: 14:17.7 (857.684 s, measured)
Series: Cut Flower Symposium
Webinar Date: July 23, 2026
Introduction
Gabrielle LaTora: Okay, so our next speakers today, we have a message from the Atlanta Flower Collective. So we’ll play their short intro and then they are on. Founded by area growers, the collective aggregates locally grown cut flowers and connects them with florists and the public across Metro Atlanta and Athens, giving small flower farms a shared path to wholesale markets.
Founding the Atlanta Flower Collective
Gabrielle LaTora: Oh, here we are.
Ashley Blackstone: Yeah, here we are.
Jess Neese: Okay.
Ashley Blackstone: Jess, you want to?
Jess Neese: Yeah, I’ll start off. My name is Jess Neese. First of all, I apologize. I’m outside. My speaker fell inside and I have dogs in there, so maybe a little trafficky. My name is Jess Neese. I’m one of the founders of the Atlanta Flower Collective along with Ashley Blackstone with Wellspring Farms. I also own a small farm, Field and Flower, in the Atlanta area.
Ashley and I met in 2000 and got together and just started brainstorming about building a collective because as farmers, we were worn out with all of handling all of the sales and marketing and distribution ourselves. On December of 2024, we got together and spent a day and just decided that this was something we were going to try to build and then we spent about nine months coming up with the idea, interviewing other collectives around the United States and coming up with our concept. And then we launched in September of 2025.
So we operated in the fall and then we’ve run through the spring and into summer and we’ll be rounding out our first year of operations at the end of the summer.
Structure and Membership
The collective is a privately owned LLC by Ashley and I and we facilitate the sales, distribution, and marketing of locally grown cut flower farms. We have eight member farms who started off with us and we have not added anyone as of yet while we’re basically just filling out the market and seeing what the needs are.
Who the Collective Sells To
So we started and we sell primarily to wholesale buyers. That’s florists, event designers, daily wedding designers, business to business, church guilds, garden clubs, anyone that has a vested interest and need for our flowers. We sell several ways. You can purchase or you can contact us and let us know that you have a future event and we have someone who works with us who works with the buyer to come up with an order for something on down the road so that you get first picks.
Pre-Orders, Floor Sales, and Delivery
We do pre-orders every Thursday, which is for the following week distribution. And then we also have floor sales where you can schedule an appointment to come shop our cooler. We do sell, we do deliver our product up to 100 miles. We utilize Roadie, which is part of UPS that’s in the Atlanta area. And then we also use Uber Courier Service to distribute.
Staffing
We have a market manager who works throughout the year and then we also have Ashley and I for anything that comes up and another person that helps with remotely with event orders, client intake and accounts receivable. Trying to think, what else I’m missing.
Consignment and Paying the Farms
With our farms we are a consignment based structure, meaning we pay out a certain portion to our farms. We do not pre-buy everything. The farms are paid on what is selling. We’re trying to think. Distribution.
Why the Collective Exists
Part of the reason that we came up with this idea is to coagulate what everyone was doing. But as the farmers, we wanted to provide a community amongst each other to help support each other because farming can get lonely and having each other to bounce off ideas has been, I think, very encouraging for all the farmers. And then also just to provide a better work life balance because farming is a very hard profession and burnout is really high in the community.
So taking the some of the tasks like the client communication and the distribution off farmers plates has really given everyone a lot more time, I would say. Let’s see, we do distribute up to 100 miles. Did I say that? Future orders, branding.
Weekly Schedule and Online Sales
Our schedule is that we operate Tuesday through Friday. So farms bring their product either Monday night or Tuesday morning, and then we start distributing Tuesday morning through Friday. We open up our floor sales Tuesday around lunchtime and then you can also schedule to shop every day through Friday at lunchtime.
We’ve recently, we do have online sales for our floor sales and we just evaluate that on the amount of traffic so that we can manage the inventory as we enter order. So we have somewhat of a live inventory for our sales, which is pretty rare, but sometimes we have to turn it off if we can’t process our orders fast enough so that we don’t oversell someone online with someone who’s currently at the floor.
The Open Food Network Platform
We use a platform for selling called the Open Food Network. We did a lot of research into trying to figure out what we wanted to use and found the Open Food Network. It’s a nonprofit that was built for farms to have a very low cost barrier and quick upstart. And those were two things that helped us and they could support a hub situation like a collective where every farm inputs their inventory and then it aggregates it so that we can sell it.
They were also able to support us having multiple inventory structures because we have pre-sale inventory and we have floor sale inventory. Inventory is probably the hardest thing that we had to work on. And if you didn’t know, you didn’t know. And so we figured that out.
Open Food Network is not perfect by any means, but it’s actually, it’s been very helpful to get us up and started and I would highly recommend if you’re a farm, you can use that system as well to sell to your clients. And some of our farms do that as well. Ashley, do you have anything to add? I feel like I went over a lot fast. I didn’t want to run out of time.
A Farm Perspective
Ashley Blackstone: Yeah, no, I’m sorry, my computer’s making a weird noise all of a sudden, but… I don’t, you’ve nailed it. I don’t, I didn’t even have, I could just sit here and listen. No, other than from a farm perspective, it has increased our time at the farm. Exponentially. It’s just been incredibly easier to take the product to one location.
I really feel like that aspect for the farmers has improved our quality of life, really. And it’s nice because you also can drop your product off and you see the other farmers and you’re able to chit chat if you need to. And so it’s definitely helped with that, like you said, being alone out working in the fields. But no, it’s been incredible. It’s been more, it’s been more than we thought, I feel like. We’re, I feel like we’re thrilled how well it’s gone for the farms and for the florists.
Location and Season
Jess Neese: Yeah, our location we ended up launching at my farm. I have a small farm in the Atlanta area. And our season runs from March through Thanksgiving, some early product around Valentine’s Day. So it was hard for us to go into signing a lease and I had some land and we threw a cooler up in the backyard of the property and it’s been working.
The location’s good and we just have a little bit more flexibility with space while we’re figuring out our, basically the finances and what we can sell and what the market’s demanding. I think that’s it. We could take any questions if anything pops out and we are part of a breakout session later on in this schedule.
Questions and Answers
Visiting the Collective
Bethany Harris: All right. Thank you, Ashley and Jessica, for your time. And we do have a couple questions that are coming in. One of the first ones is talking about how to make an appointment to visit the collective. So we have florists and farmers that are interested in coming, taking a visit to the collective. Is there an appointment process? How does that work?
Jess Neese: Yeah, we’d be happy to take an appointment. You can actually schedule an appointment online to shop the cooler, which it’s on our website and it’s from Tuesday to Fridays and you can pick a time and a hundred percent if you’re a grower come see us to see what we’re doing.
We also did get lots of questions about when we’re going to take new growers. And right now we’re just committing to our founding farmers and once we exhaust demand is when we’ll start expanding.
Estimating Stem Counts
Bethany Harris: Perfect. And then we’ve got one more and it’s as I start a collective in North Alabama. They’re having struggles with stem count estimates. So how do you gather that information?
Jess Neese: Trial and error. And just talking to farmers, talk to other collectives. We didn’t do a lot of projections like that. Ashley and I were pretty lucky in that we came in with a lot of established relationships with current buyers already. I think when we came in, we probably had a list of about a hundred florists that we were both working with. I think now we’re up to almost 500.
So we didn’t spend a lot of time as a collective looking at production, but as farms we do talk about that a lot amongst each other. And so I would say as a farmer, get your group together and talk as much as you can to get production data. Because there’s not central information about crops and production, which is something that Ashley and I talked a lot about and trying to gather that information because it’s… there’s no, I would say, one-stop place to get that data.
Ashley Blackstone: Was the stem count question in regard to for the farms learning how to count how many stems are going to be available? Or is the question in regard to what we make it? I’m just, I’m confused about that question.
Jess Neese: Oh yeah, that’s a good idea to think about.
Bethany Harris: Yeah, I think it’s, my understanding is they’re starting a collective and thinking this is specific maybe to the farm directly. You know, maybe they’re… their farmers are asking these questions to them.
Ashley Blackstone: Okay. Yes, how the farmer counts the stems for availability. Oh, that just takes practice over time. It’s hard. That is hard to estimate. You have to know each crop. You have to. Some weeks I’ve gone over and done too many, but typically I tend to underestimate.
But it’s really crop specific. Yeah, most farms end up underestimating when they do their pre-sales.
Jess Neese: But as time goes on, your farms will get more confident. And the people that really nail it will actually capture some of those initial sales. But if you do have the opportunity to do floor sales, we have seen that between pre-sales and floor sales, our sales are actually almost split 50-50. So there’s a lot of opportunity out there on both sides. And there are collectives that only do pre-sales, I think due to location and space. So I think there’s different ways if you’re starting a collective to think about it.
Bethany Harris: Awesome. Thank you all very much for your time.
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