THE VALUE of amenity horticulture – worth €67.4 million last year – has dropped by over a third and many nurseries are facing closure, it has been predicted.
Jim Kelleher, Teagasc horticulture specialist, said this decline had been based on feedback from the sector which employs about 3,500 people across the State.
There were 220 commercial nurseries in Ireland which, with garden centres, created this level of employment. “This year has been a tough trading year for the nursery stock industry with many nurseries facing closure,” he said.
Uncertainty in relation to consumer discretionary spending had been affecting sales in the sector.
“The coming years will see nurseries needing to exploit income-earning opportunities by developing sustainable technologies and practices to reduce their cost base,” Mr Kelleher told the National Nursery Stock conference in Kilkenny.
The conference, held in association with An Bord Bia (which organises Bloom, the national garden festival), had the theme of increasing profits by harnessing sustainable technologies.
One of the initiatives under discussion was about developing “green credentials” through the climate friendly nurseries project launched at the conference.
Earlier this month, hli (Horticulture and Landscape Ireland ) magazine carried a feature on the difficulties in the industry and how to overcome them.
One of the contributors, Darragh Shaw of Turlough Nurseries, Castlebar, said nurseries were taking a severe hit because of the change in the economy. He wrote that several nurseries had had to let staff go and and were finding it difficult to survive.
His company had switched earlier this year to producing and trading in vegetable plants which had brought a lot of people into the premises who then also bought small shrubs and trees.