Greenhouse, Nursery, and Floriculture Production (U.S.) — NAICS 1114

A Histometrics rollup primer for public- and private-market investors

North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code 1114, Greenhouse, Nursery, and Floriculture Production, is the federal industry group for growing high-value specialty crops in greenhouses, nurseries, and covered structures — as opposed to open-field row crops (grains, oilseeds) or orchards. It has two child industries: 11141 Food Crops Grown Under Cover (mushrooms plus greenhouse vegetables, herbs, berries, and indoor "vertical" farms) and 11142 Nursery and Floriculture Production (the living ornamental plants — trees, shrubs, sod, bedding plants, potted flowers, foliage, and cut flowers). This primer synthesizes the two already-written child primers plus the federal statistics for this level; its distinctive value is the contrast between an edible half and an ornamental half that share an operating DNA but sit at very different sizes.

1. Overview

The unifying idea of NAICS 1114 is horticultural-specialty production: crops grown intensively — often in a building or under protective structure, always on a small footprint at high value per square foot — where the swing factors are labor, energy, yield per unit of growing area, perishability, and channel access, not acreage or rainfall. Both children behave more like biological manufacturing than like field farming: living inventory that is seasonal, perishable, labor-hungry, capital-heavy, and expensive to move, where the gap between what you grow and what you actually sell (shrink, disease, spoilage, unsold plants) is where money is made or lost.

The two children share that DNA but diverge sharply on the one thing an investor cares about most — what the crop is for. Food Crops Grown Under Cover (11141) grows things people eat: it is regulated for food safety, exposed to imported produce, and driven by food-staple demand and a reshoring story. Nursery and Floriculture Production (11142) grows things people plant or gift: it is regulated for plant health, driven by housing and discretionary spending, and roughly seven times larger. What they hold in common is decisive for capital allocation: on both sides the durable operating leaders are private, there is no scaled, blue-chip public pure-play grower in the United States, and both are quietly consolidating into strong private and private-equity hands. This is, first and foremost, a private-markets operator's industry — hard to touch cleanly from a brokerage account.

2. What's inside — the two child industries and how they differ

Both children are covered-crop / horticultural-specialty producers that lean on the same labor pool, the same wholesale and big-box channels, and the same USDA measurement. But their size, purpose, demand drivers, import exposure, and regulator differ sharply. (Tickers appear only in Sections 4 and 10.)

The one-line contrast: 11141 is the small, edible, food-safety-and-import half — a ~$2 billion CEA (controlled-environment agriculture) food category that just survived a venture bust on the greenhouse side and consolidates slowly on the mushroom side. 11142 is the large, ornamental, housing-and-gifting half — a ~$14 billion living-plant industry upstream of home improvement, landscaping, and floral retail. Different crop, different regulator, different demand engine — but the same private ownership reality: neither child is a public-equity sector today.

3. How big it is (the rollup)

No ingested federal stats for this exact code. Our ground-truth file for NAICS 1114 contains no metrics — no sales, establishment, employment, or payroll total is supplied for this four-digit code. The figures below are drawn from the child primers' cited USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) sources, clearly labeled, and should be read as estimates rather than an official 1114 total.

Two framing facts make this level unusually clean to size, and one makes it messy:

• One federal instrument covers essentially the whole level. USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) runs a once-every-five-years Census of Horticultural Specialties, whose 2024 edition reported $18.3 billion in sales across 23,060 operations [1]. That census bundles together mushrooms and food crops under cover (11141) and nursery and floriculture (11142) — which is almost exactly the definition of NAICS 1114. So $18.3 billion / 23,060 operations is the best single-survey rollup for this level.
• A component build-up lands a little lower. Summing the most-cited series for each child gives roughly $14 billion for 11142 (nursery stock, sod, and Christmas trees ≈$7.5B [1] + floriculture ≈$6.7B from the annual Floriculture Crops survey [5]) plus roughly $2.1 billion for 11141 (mushrooms ≈$1.1B crop-year [2], up to ≈$1.5B on the census basis [4], plus greenhouse food ≈$1.0B for 2022 [3]) — about $16 billion.
• The two totals bracket the level at roughly $16–18 billion. They differ because the components come from different USDA surveys in different reference years (annual floriculture survey vs. five-year census; 2022 Census of Agriculture for greenhouse food vs. 2024 horticultural census for mushrooms). Treat "~$16–18B" and the ~87% / ~13% split (ornamental vs. edible) as directional, not audited.

Producers, footprint, and labor. The 2024 horticultural census counted 23,060 operations reporting about 248,827 hired workers [1]. Within it, the floriculture survey alone counted 11,262 producers on 969 million square feet of covered production [5]; the mushroom line counted 415 operations [4]; the greenhouse-food line (2022 Census of Agriculture) counted ~11,465 operations [3]. These come from different instruments and should not be added.

Concentration. California, Florida, and Oregon lead all horticultural sales; five states booked ~48% of 2024 sales [1]. Within the edible half, geography is even tighter — Pennsylvania (Kennett Square) grows ~69% of U.S. Agaricus mushrooms [2].

Undercount and coverage caveats. The general business-statistics series most industries rely on — the Economic Census, County Business Patterns, Statistics of U.S. Businesses, and Nonemployer Statistics — largely exclude crop production (NAICS 111) [12], so they show almost nothing for this code; USDA is the correct ground truth, which is exactly why our federal file is empty. Even USDA undercounts at the edges: the horticultural census counts only operations selling $10,000 or more [1][5], excluding the long tail of hobby growers, roadside sellers, and micro-nurseries — and because small, individually owned operations dominate this level by count, the true grower count is larger than any single series shows. Two further distortions: on the edible side, consumption far exceeds domestic production (most greenhouse produce is imported), so farm-gate output understates the market Americans actually buy; and most of the dollar value the public associates with "plants and flowers" sits downstream in separate codes — garden-center retail (444240) and landscaping services (561730). One academic estimate put the entire "green industry" value chain (production plus retail plus services) at ~$159.6 billion and ~1.6 million direct jobs in 2018 [13]; all of NAICS 1114 is only the production link. Finally, both children are small-business-dominated — the Small Business Administration (SBA) size standard for 11141 is $4.5 million in average annual receipts [14], a program-eligibility line, not a revenue estimate, but a signal that most operations are small.

4. The investable universe (where value concentrates across the children)

The single most important fact for a public-market investor is identical on both sides: value concentrates in private hands, and there is no large-cap pure-play grower — edible or ornamental — listed in the United States. In the broader horticulture census, corporate-owned operations (a minority by count) generated ~63% of sales [1], and the largest of those corporations are private. (This section and Section 10 are the only places tickers appear.)

Edible half (11141) — private, with foreign or distressed listed scraps. No U.S.-listed mushroom pure-play exists; the nearest listed operator is foreign — Hokuto Corp. (Tokyo: 1379), a mostly-Japan business with one U.S. specialty farm [17] — while U.S. mushroom tickers (FAMI, MSRM) are off-target or speculative. On the greenhouse-food side the 2020–2021 blank-check (SPAC — special-purpose acquisition company) wave has almost entirely unwound: Local Bounti (NYSE: LOCL) is the clearest listed U.S. CEA name but is a loss-making microcap with going-concern pressure [18], and Village Farms (Nasdaq: VFF) sold most of its U.S. produce business into private, PE-backed Vanguard Food in 2025 and pivoted toward cannabis [19]; AppHarvest, AeroFarms, Kalera, Bowery, and Plenty all went bankrupt [16]. The healthy operators are private: Monterey Mushrooms, South Mill Champs (PE-backed), Giorgio/Phillips/To-Jo (mushrooms); Mastronardi/SUNSET, NatureSweet, BrightFarms/Mucci (Cox), Gotham Greens, Little Leaf Farms (greenhouse produce) [15].

Ornamental half (11142) — private growers behind a few thin public windows.

Where production actually sits — large private growers (financials mostly undisclosed): Costa Farms (majority-owned by public Markel), Altman Plants, Metrolina Greenhouses, Bailey Nurseries, Monrovia, Green Circle Growers, and consolidators like the Hoffmann Family of Companies; upstream, patented-genetics breeders Ball Horticultural, Dümmen Orange, Syngenta Flowers collect royalties from both children [1][6].

Common conclusion: across both children the durable leaders are private; the public route is a foreign stock, a repurposed cannabis story, a distressed microcap, a diluted holding-company window, or the picks-and-shovels suppliers (greenhouse structures, LED lighting, climate control, substrates, packaging, cold chain, genetics) and channel names that sell regardless of which grower wins. Real estate investment trusts (REITs) mostly hold open-field cropland, a poor proxy for either child's specialized buildings and greenhouses.

5. How the money works

Both children earn money like a factory, not a field: saleable volume × realized price, where output is a function of growing area and yield per square foot (not acreage), and the gap between biological and saleable output (shrink) is the margin battleground. But the production line differs.

• The edible line runs on food economics. Two price tiers in each crop: commodity product (button mushrooms ~$1.53/lb, commodity round tomatoes) at thin margins on volume, versus specialty/branded product (specialty mushrooms ~$5.83/lb; snacking tomatoes, berries, organics, packaged herbs) where the profit lives [2][3]. Perishability is acute — crops move within days, cold chain is mandatory, and every unsold pound is a direct margin hit.
• The ornamental line runs on horticulture economics. Nursery is a land-and-time business — dollars per acre per year over multi-year crops (trees 3–7 yrs), working-capital-heavy, with shrink measured in lost years. Floriculture is a greenhouse-and-turns business — sales per square foot × crop turns, with a compressed spring/holiday selling window and unsold plants composted for total loss.
• Labor and energy are the shared swing costs. Both are hand-labor businesses (labor ~37% of expenses across the horticultural census, ~$5.6B [1]; mushrooms are entirely hand-harvested); both are energy-exposed, most acutely in fully enclosed greenhouses reliant on artificial (LED — light-emitting diode) light — the cost structure that repeatedly sank "grow everything in a warehouse" models [9]. Input costs (media, containers, fertilizer, fuel) rose 39–54% since 2019 [1], squeezing growers who can't fully pass price through.
• Capital intensity and the 2022–23 rate shock. A commercial greenhouse runs ~$1–3 million per acre with 7–10+ year paybacks [9]; when capital got expensive, the venture-funded greenhouse-food cohort (and over-leveraged nursery names) folded, while older, privately financed operators largely did not.
• Channel and buyer power are shared. ~85% of ornamental product sells wholesale [1]; both children face a handful of big-box buyers wielding price, timing, and inventory-risk leverage (including "pay-by-scan," where the grower owns the plant on the shelf until checkout). Scale economics are stark: in the horticultural census, operations selling ≥$2.5M were ~6% of operations but ~75% of total sales [1].
• The durable margin lever differs. In the edible half it is mix-shift to premium/specialty and food-safety-driven retailer preference; in the ornamental half it is patented/branded genetics carrying royalties and pricing power that commodity plants lack.
• Shared underwriting KPIs: saleable units per square foot, realized price by variety/channel, labor and energy cost per unit, productive-area utilization and crop turns, shrink/crop-loss history, customer concentration, maintenance capital expenditure, and debt-service coverage.

6. What drives demand

Demand at this level is largely derived — something else creates the need to grow a plant — but the engine differs by child.

• Food staple, food safety, and reshoring (edible half). Retailers want year-round, blemish-free, food-safe supply; recurring field-produce recalls push grocers toward controlled-environment produce. Because most U.S. greenhouse produce is imported, trade policy moves domestic economics directly — a July 2025 17.09% antidumping duty on most fresh Mexican tomatoes is a live tailwind for domestic growers [8]. A functional-mushroom boom (lion's mane, reishi) and plant-forward eating add premium pull [2][30], though a ~10% post-pandemic slip in per-capita fresh-mushroom consumption is a near-term soft spot [2].
• Housing, construction, and rates (ornamental, nursery-tilted). New homes and commercial/municipal projects need trees, shrubs, and sod, making the nursery side rate-sensitive twice over — through housing affordability and through leveraged working capital [28].
• Discretionary income, gifting, and the spring season (ornamental, floriculture-tilted). Flowers are non-essential; cut-flower demand spikes at Valentine's Day and Mother's Day (a record ~$3.2B on Mother's Day flowers in 2024 [6]), and bedding/potted plants — the single largest category in the whole level (~$2.7B) — sell in a compressed spring window where one cold, wet spring can erase a year's profit [1].
• Shared drivers. Home-improvement traffic and existing-home turnover; recurring maintenance, beautification, and restoration demand (steadier than new installation); the normalized houseplant/foliage base (~$0.9B [1]); new branded genetics; and weather/climate, which is double-edged — storms and freezes destroy existing plantings (driving replacement demand) but can also wipe out a grower's own crop.

7. Regulation

Both children are lightly regulated on the financial side and heavily regulated on safety, plant health, and labor — but the lead agency differs by what the crop is.

• Food safety (edible half, FDA-led). The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) Produce Safety Rule governs growing, harvesting, packing, and holding, with Listeria environmental monitoring at fresh-pack facilities and a Foreign Supplier Verification Program for imports — a live issue after imported enoki mushrooms caused a deadly multistate Listeria outbreak [10][31].
• Plant health / phytosanitary (ornamental half, USDA APHIS-led). USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) regulates interstate movement and imposes domestic quarantines for invasive pests (spotted lanternfly, boxwood blight, emerald ash borer), which can instantly cut a grower off from out-of-state markets; APHIS and Customs also inspect the ~80% of cut flowers arriving from abroad [11]. Every state runs its own nursery licensing and phytosanitary-certificate program, a major reason the ornamental side stays regional.
• Organic (both). USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) National Organic Program certifies both; open questions include new mushroom-substrate provisions and the contested status of hydroponic organic certification [32].
• Labor and immigration (the biggest shared swing factor). Both lean on the H-2A (agricultural, uncapped) and, for ornamentals, H-2B (non-agricultural, capped) guest-worker visas administered by the Department of Labor (DOL); mandated wage rates, housing rules, and immigration-enforcement policy are first-order cost and staffing risks (the mushroom industry reports running ~20% short on labor) [27].
• Intellectual property, trade, and site rules (both). Plant patents, the Plant Variety Protection Act, and trademarks protect royalty-bearing genetics [33]; antidumping/countervailing duties (the 2025 tomato order [8]) and tariff shifts on imported flowers/inputs (a threatened-then-withdrawn Colombia tariff, then a ~10% baseline [7]) move competitiveness in both directions; and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) pesticide rules, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) hazards, water rights, zoning, and (for mushrooms) composting-odor permits round out the frame.

Across both children, compliance is a competitive barrier: larger operators spread food-safety, phytosanitary, and audit systems over more volume, favoring the consolidators.

8. Consolidation

Consolidation into strong private hands is the shared trend, reached by different roads. The edible half consolidated on two clocks: mushrooms slowly and quietly for decades (a falling grower count against flat-to-rising output, PE roll-ups like Eos-backed South Mill Champs), and greenhouse food violently and recently — after ~$2.7 billion of venture money and a SPAC wave, celebrated names failed (AppHarvest, AeroFarms, Kalera, Bowery, Plenty) and their assets migrated to disciplined private owners (Mastronardi, Cox, Blue Road) [9][16][15]. The ornamental half is consolidating at the top and fragmented at the bottom, driven by an aging owner base facing succession and big-box/national-landscaper buyers that prefer fewer, larger, multi-region suppliers — Costa Farms (via public Markel) buying Battlefield Farms, Metrolina merging with South Central Growers, the Hoffmann Family rolling up greenhouses, and cautionary leverage stories like the Everde Growers Chapter 11 (§9) [1][6][29].

In both children, scale wins in packing, cold chain, procurement, and retailer service, and growing capacity without retail access is not a moat. Upstream genetics is concentrating too (Ball, Dümmen Orange, Syngenta Flowers), handing breeders royalty leverage over a fragmented grower base [6]. The main deal risk in either child is overpaying for capacity before proving durable yields, reliable labor, and repeat retail demand — with the added edible-half risk that imports (Mexican produce, Colombian/Ecuadorian flowers), not domestic rivals, are the real competitive force.

9. Risks

Most risks are shared; a few are child-specific.

• Labor and immigration (shared, dominant). Hand-harvested crops on both sides; H-2A/H-2B wage, availability, and enforcement risk hit the biggest cost line directly [27].
• Weather and climate (shared). Freeze, drought, hurricane, and wildfire wipe out crops; for floriculture a single bad spring erases a year's profit — the same events that create replacement demand can crush the grower's own crop.
• Energy (shared, greenhouse-tilted). The largest variable cost for greenhouses and existential for artificial-light indoor models; a meaningful cost for mushrooms and heated glasshouses.
• Thin margins, perishability, and timing. Little pricing power once a crop is ready; shrink is a direct hit; crops are committed ahead (years for nursery, a season for floriculture, days of shelf life for produce), so a grower can plant into strength and harvest into weakness.
• Capital intensity, leverage, and refinancing. High build costs and long paybacks; going-concern exposure when capital is dear — the mistake that sank much of the 2021 greenhouse-food cohort and the leveraged Everde Growers nursery roll-up (Chapter 11, Feb. 2025, ~6,700 acres, ~$207M debt) [9][29].
• Biological / disease / quarantine risk. Pathogens spread fast through enclosed monoculture (a factor in Bowery's collapse; a constant mushroom-house threat); on the ornamental side an APHIS quarantine can sever entire state markets [11].
• Food-safety and recall risk (edible-specific). A Listeria or E. coli recall carries outsized reputational and financial damage [31].
• Imports and trade-policy reversal. Mexican/Canadian produce and Colombian/Ecuadorian flowers are the baseline competition; the 2025 tomato duty and flower tariffs can be litigated or negotiated away in either direction [7][8].
• Concentration and channel power. Geographic (~69% of Agaricus in one PA county) and customer concentration; a few big-box buyers set assortment, price, and pay-by-scan terms.
• Ownership opacity and data risk. Private companies disclose little, and there is no clean, complete NAICS 1114 denominator — industry-size and market-share claims are easy to overstate (see §3).

10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public routes (all indirect or narrow — no scaled pure-play grower on either side).

• Edible half: the nearest operator is foreign — Hokuto (Tokyo: 1379) [17]; Local Bounti (NYSE: LOCL) is the most direct U.S. CEA name but carries real financing/listing risk [18], and Village Farms (Nasdaq: VFF) is now a cannabis-hybrid after divesting most produce [19].
• Ornamental half: Markel (MKL), which owns a majority of Costa Farms [20]; Bloomia (TULP), a micro-cap tulip grower [21]; Central Garden & Pet (CENT/CENTA), which owns Bell Nursery [22] — each a thin or diluted window.
• Shared indirect exposure: the picks-and-shovels suppliers (greenhouse structures, LED lighting, climate control, substrates, genetics, packaging, cold chain), distribution/channel (SiteOne, SITE) [23], services/demand (BrightView, BV; 1-800-Flowers, FLWS) [24][26], inputs (Scotts Miracle-Gro, SMG) [25], and the big-box retail channel (HD, LOW, WMT) that sets spring volumes [1]. REITs mostly hold open-field cropland, not covered-crop facilities.

Private routes (where both children actually live). Direct equity in growers and grower-marketers; PE roll-ups and search-fund acquisitions on the South Mill/Eos, Mastronardi/Blue Road, and Hoffmann templates (the aging-owner succession wave is the central thesis on the ornamental side); growth capital, private credit, and equipment finance; greenhouse/nursery real estate and sale-leasebacks; and venture bets on functional-mushroom brands and surviving indoor niches. Underwrite at the facility level using the KPIs in §5, and value against mid-cycle, not peak-season, earnings — the replacement cost of productive land, greenhouses, and growing rooms, not headline spring or crop-year revenue.

Outlook. The level is a barbell of purpose and size. The small edible half (11141) is bifurcated — a defensive, cost-driven mushroom staple with a genuinely faster premium/functional layer, plus a chastened greenhouse-food reshoring story riding a 2025 import-duty tailwind, where the winners are sunlight-based greenhouse operators at scale, decidedly not a return to "vertical farms everywhere." The large ornamental half (11142) diverges internally too — a faster-growing, rate-gated nursery side and a low-growth, margin-pressured floriculture side where operating efficiency and retailer relationships separate winners from exits. Across the whole ~$16–18 billion level, expect the same structural forces: gradual consolidation as owners retire, more automation to blunt labor costs, patented genetics and premium mix as the durable margin lever, and rising labor, energy, biosecurity, and weather volatility as the biggest sources of year-to-year earnings risk. For most investors this remains a private-markets, operator's industry — returns earned through operating discipline and private capital, with execution (not demand collapse) as the main downside — and best owned by those who can live with living, perishable inventory.

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Sources

1. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), "Horticulture Highlights: Results from the 2024 Census of Horticultural Specialties" (ACH22-27), Feb. 2026 — $18.3B / 23,060 operations; nursery-stock, channel, ownership, labor, cost-stack, geography, and scale breakdowns; the single-survey rollup covering both children. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2026/HorticulturalSpecialties2024.pdf
2. USDA NASS, Mushrooms (Aug. 2025) — 2024–2025 crop-year sales ($1.096B), volume, price, specialty/organic detail, per-capita consumption, Pennsylvania share. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/mush0825.pdf
3. USDA NASS, 2022 Census of Agriculture, Vol. 1, Ch. 1, Table 39 — Food Crops Grown Under Glass or Other Protection (greenhouse vegetables/herbs $981.7M; ~11,465 operations). https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/Full_Report/Volume_1,_Chapter_1_US/st99_1_039_039.pdf
4. USDA NASS, Census of Horticultural Specialties — Table 16: Cultivated Mushrooms, 2024 (415 operations; 933.0M lb; $1.503B). https://data.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/Online_Resources/Census_of_Horticulture_Specialties/hortic_2_016_016.pdf
5. USDA NASS, "Floriculture Crops 2024 Summary," 2026 — $6.71B total floriculture sales; 11,262 producers; 969M sq ft; top states. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/floran26.pdf
6. USDA Economic Research Service and industry sources on cut-flower imports (~80% imported; domestic revival), private-grower consolidation, and genetics (Greenhouse Grower "Top 100 Growers"; Costa/Battlefield; Metrolina/South Central; Hoffmann; Ball/Dümmen Orange/Syngenta Flowers). https://www.greenhousegrower.com/management/greenhouse-growers-the-2026-top-100-growers/
7. CNBC, "Trump Colombia tariffs: coffee, crude oil and cut flowers could see higher prices," Jan. 2025, and trade coverage of the 2025 Andean-flower tariff shift. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/26/trump-colombia-tariffs-coffee-crude-oil-and-cut-flowers-could-see-higher-prices.html
8. Federal Register, "Fresh Tomatoes From Mexico: Termination of Suspension Agreement … and Imposition of an Antidumping Duty Order" (17.09% duty, effective July 14, 2025), U.S. Dept. of Commerce (2025). https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/07/17/2025-13453/fresh-tomatoes-from-mexico-termination-of-suspension-agreement-rescission-of-administrative-reviews
9. Oxford University Press, Plant Physiology, "Vertical farming limitations and potential" (energy kWh/kg, ~$1–3M/acre capex, ~$2.7B losses) (2025). https://academic.oup.com/plphys/article/198/3/kiaf056/8104144
10. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, "FSMA Final Rule on Produce Safety." https://www.fda.gov/food/food-safety-modernization-act-fsma/fsma-final-rule-produce-safety
11. USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), Plant Protection and Quarantine programs; cut-flower import inspection. https://www.aphis.usda.gov/plant-pests-diseases/slf
12. U.S. Census Bureau, Statistics of U.S. Businesses / Nonemployer Statistics / County Business Patterns (all largely exclude crop production, NAICS 111); NAICS 2022 structure for 1114, 11141, 11142. https://www.census.gov/econ/overview/susb.html
13. Hall, Hodges, Palma, et al., "Economic Contributions of the Green Industry in the United States in 2018," Ellison Chair, Texas A&M University, 2020 — ~$159.6B direct output; ~1.6M direct jobs across production-plus-retail-plus-services. https://ellisonchair.tamu.edu/files/2020/11/Green-Industry-Economic-Contributions-Report.pdf
14. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Size Standards (2023) — NAICS 111411/111419 = $4.5M receipts. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
15. Monterey Mushrooms / South Mill Champs / Eos Partners; and private greenhouse-produce owners (Mastronardi/SUNSET, NatureSweet/Blue Road, BrightFarms/Mucci via Cox, Gotham Greens, Little Leaf). https://southmill.com/about-us/company-history/
16. The Food Institute / TechCrunch, CEA bankruptcy outcomes (AppHarvest, AeroFarms, Kalera, Bowery, Plenty) (2023–2025). https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/04/bowery-farming-is-ceasing-operations/
17. Yahoo Finance, "Hokuto Corporation (1379.T)"; Hokto Kinoko (U.S. operations). https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/1379.T/
18. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Local Bounti Corporation filings — revenue, NYSE listing noncompliance, going concern (2024–2026). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1840780/000162828026035317/locl-20260331.htm
19. SEC, Village Farms International Form 8-K / 10-K — Vanguard Food LP transaction and cannabis pivot (2025–2026). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1584549/000119312526104189/vff-20251231.htm
20. Markel Group, "Markel Announces Investment in Costa Farms" (2017) and 2025 Form 10-K (SEC) — ~81% stake via Markel Ventures; Costa/Battlefield (2024). https://www.markel.com/about-us/news-and-press/markel-announces-investment-in-costa-farms-7781
21. SEC, Bloomia Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: TULP), Form 10-Q, 2026 — hydroponic fresh-cut tulip grower (~90M stems/yr). https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0000875355&type=10-Q
22. Central Garden & Pet Company (Nasdaq: CENT/CENTA), Form 10-K; "Central Garden & Pet Acquires Bell Nursery." https://ir.central.com/
23. SiteOne Landscape Supply (NYSE: SITE), 2025 Form 10-K (SEC) — largest distributor of green goods. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650729/000165072926000005/site-20251228.htm
24. BrightView Holdings (NYSE: BV), 2025 Form 10-K (SEC) — largest U.S. commercial landscaper. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1734713/000119312525288109/bv-20250930.htm
25. The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company (NYSE: SMG), 2025 Form 10-K (SEC) — consumer lawn-and-garden inputs. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/825542/000082554225000022/smg-20250930.htm
26. 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc. (Nasdaq: FLWS), Form 10-K, FY ended June 29, 2025 (SEC) — floral e-commerce / gifting. https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001084869&type=10-K
27. U.S. Department of Labor, "H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program" (Adverse Effect Wage Rate); University of Florida IFAS, "H-2A Workers in Demand in the Ornamental Horticulture Industry." https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/programs/h-2a
28. University of Georgia CAES, "2026 Green Industry Outlook," and Farm Credit East, "2026 Outlook for the Green Industry." https://fieldreport.caes.uga.edu/publications/AP130-4-12/2026-green-industry-forecast/
29. Nursery Management / Greenhouse Grower (GIE Media), "Everde Growers files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy" (Feb. 24, 2025) — ~6,700 acres; ~$207M debt; ~$131.7M sale. https://www.nurserymag.com/news/everde-growers-files-bankruptcy-treetown-usa-texas/
30. Mordor Intelligence, "Functional Mushroom Market" (2025). https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/functional-mushroom-market
31. National Institutes of Health / PMC, "An Overview of Listeriosis Outbreak Investigations Linked to Imported Enoki Mushrooms." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12441183/
32. USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, National Organic Program — mushroom market-development rule and organic (incl. hydroponic-organic) certification. https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/national-organic-program-market-development-mushrooms-and-pet-food
33. USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, "Plant Variety Protection," and U.S. plant-patent/trademark protections. https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/plant-variety-protection