Growers Buying Growers: A Silver Fern Industry Report
Growers Buying Growers is a Silver Fern industry report: 819 transactions across 172 years of consolidation in ornamental horticulture, from 1854 to 2026, assembled from public sources. The research consulted 3,179 public sources.
What the research shows
- The 2020s are the busiest dealmaking era in this research: 253 deals since 2020, more than the 195 from the entire 2010s, and 2025 alone logged 54 deals, the most of any single year.
- Succession is the leading reason on the seller’s side. 140 deals were triggered by an owner retiring or handing over the business. Other reasons included strategic sales to a larger operator, distress, private capital, and estate breakups. For 376 of the 819 deals, no clear reason was publicly available.
- The top is pulling away: the largest grower’s share of reported Top 100 footprint rose from 6.8 to 16.9 percent since 2009, while the median ranked grower got 16 percent smaller.
- The buying is spread wide: 625 distinct buyers closed the 819 deals, and 568 of them bought exactly once.
- The same operations keep selling: 31 sold, in whole or in part, in two or more separate years, with a median of 10 years between sales of the same operation. Hines Horticulture is the most extreme example, sold in seven separate years.
- The headline prices are not typical of the market: of the 21 deals since 2010 with a public dollar price, the median was $8.6 million, and 12 came in under $10 million.
What’s inside
The full report holds the detail behind each of these findings: the deal-by-deal table with sources for every transaction, the acquirer lineages, era-by-era charts, the methodology, and a downloadable CSV of the deal data.