Are your customers asking for sustainable products? If you answered no, are you sure about that? At an OFA Short Course roundtable by GIE Media, industry leaders in the field of sustainability discussed where the push for sustainability comes from.

Where does demand come from? If you ask most garden centers, they're not stocking sustainable products unless their customers ask for it, according to Buglady Consulting's Suzanne Wainright-Evans. If standards and certifications want to succeed, they need to become familiar to the consumer and come back up the supply chain instead of a top-down approach.

The desire for sustainable or organic products might not be passed back up from store employees to management, she points out. Have you asked your store employees if they've had any requests for sustainable products? 

And while not all gardeners are asking for sustainable products, Lloyd Traven of organic grower Peace Tree Farms says that 40 percent of first-time gardeners are asking for organic products. "Newbies say they want it and store buyers are saying they don't care," he says. "It's not presented as an option, the customers aren't being told when these products are in stock, if they do carry them."

The Green Supply Chain. As a grower-retailer, Traven says he is now looking back up the supply chain, going all the way back to the unrooted cutting supplier to see how they're produced. It all must be organic, because if unrooted cuttings are produced from plants under traditional crop protection, biocontrols won't work during rooting and production.

"We look for places that are able to supply a report of what they've applied," Traven says. "We demand that information. We can't have plants covered with chemicals."