Growers Buying Growers: A Silver Fern Industry Report
Growers Buying Growers is a Silver Fern industry report: 822 transactions across 172 years of consolidation in ornamental horticulture, from 1854 to 2026, assembled from public sources. The research consulted 3,186 public sources.
Updated October 14, 2026 with three additional grower transactions. Recent deals and follow-up reporting appear in the report’s Updates section.
What the research shows
- The 2020s are the busiest dealmaking era in this research: 256 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. 141 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 378 of the 822 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: 628 distinct buyers closed the 822 deals, and 571 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.