How Five Friends Are Saving Their Tulip Farm From COVID-19
They’ve returned to their roots to keep a cherished Washington industry alive.
In Skagit Valley, Washington, the sight of sprouting tulips means far more than a sign of spring.
The iconic blooms have been the centerpiece to the region’s agritourism sector since the launch of the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival in 1984. And more tulip bulbs are produced in Skagit County than any county in the US.
So when Skagitonians Andrew Miller, Randy Howard, Donnie Keltz, Rachael Ward Sparwasser and Angela Speer heard that one of the only two growers left in the valley were looking to sell their farm, they knew it was an opportunity to preserve an important piece of their hometown’s identity. This squad of five high school friends felt it was time to give back to the place that gave them their start in life.
“We all grew up in the field,” Miller says. “Agriculture is such a big part of what we think really helped shape us to be successful.”
In June 2019, the group purchased Tulip Town, a 30-acre community treasure, and left corporate careers in law and finance behind them. But when Washington Governor Jay Inslee issued a stay at home order in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the group had to shut down the farm on the cusp of their inaugural season. And for the first time since its inception, the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival was cancelled.
The Tulip Town team quickly needed to figure out how they would make up for the huge amount of lost revenue during a vital few weeks for the farm. The farm typically makes around 90 percent of its revenue during the month of April, when people attend the tulip festival. Washington State University estimates the tulip festival brings $65 million of revenue and draws crowds of roughly 300,000 to the county.
“As if farming is not hard enough, we had to turn around and completely redo our business model,” Miller says.
It took just a matter of days for the team to come up with solutions for how it was going to make up for the festival’s cancellation, and the farm’s closure. They started online flower campaigns inviting people to buy or donate flowers to friends, family or workplaces. The group also created a membership that gives locals the opportunity to help invest in the future of the farm, and is set to launch an app that will feature its fields in virtual reality.
The group says it has sold thousands of bouquets during the pandemic, and has had a lot of success with its “What’s at Stake” campaign, which invites people to buy a physical stake that is planted in the farm’s field. They say that more than 4,000 bouquets have been purchased for local hospitals and nursing homes through their “#ColorforCourage” initiative.
“It’s been a very elaborate dress rehearsal… but we feel people really want to see us succeed,” Speer says. “I think one thing that’s become more clear to us is the importance of tulips in the valley. We know that all this effort that we’re putting in, it’s super important to us to be saving our farm, but it’s also very important to our community.”
The Tulip Town owners hope that they will be able to safely welcome the public back to their fields in the future. But regardless of how and when that will happen, they say they’re focused on strengthening community connections and building on the area’s rich agriculture history in the years to come.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
-
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
-
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
-
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
-
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
-
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
-
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
-
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].How Five Friends Are Saving Their Tulip Farm From COVID-19
by Lindsay Campbell, Modern Farmer
April 26, 2020
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreExplore other topics
Share With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
Submit
It is nice to know I can see tulips en masse in the US. I am too old to go overseas for the show. I will be there next year if I am still around.
I’d buy high res flower picture ebooks and wallpapers. Need something pretty amidst all the news. Etsy store would make it easy to start with the digital products. Ebook with purchase option for bulbs of the tulips shown! Deer ate this year’s tulips.
What a beautiful site and sight. We were there in 2019 for a wedding and during the tulip festival. I hope I can help in someway someday