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Cardinal News
Serving Southwest and Southside Virginia
Puckett Greenhouses in Patrick County began with a fishing trip.
In the 1970s, Montague Puckett bought $86 worth of plants and resold them to pay for gas money and other expenses for the trip.
All of the plants sold, so he tried it again the next weekend.
“It just kind of snowballed from there,” said Ashley Payne, one of Puckett’s granddaughters and a current co-owner of the wholesale greenhouse business.
Fast forward to today, and Puckett Greenhouses, in the small community of Ararat near the North Carolina state line, has more than 50 greenhouses where it grows hanging plants, vegetable starters and fruit trees. It manufactures greenhouses and sells equipment for greenhouse maintenance and repair.
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And it was recently awarded a $200,000 federal grant as part of a new program aimed at improving working conditions and housing for agricultural employees.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Labor Stabilization and Protection Pilot Program was first announced in September 2023 with a goal to “improve the resiliency of the U.S. food supply chain by addressing agriculture labor challenges and instability, strengthen protections for farmworkers, and expand legal pathways for labor migration,” according to a June news release.
Puckett Greenhouses plans to put the money toward three main goals: establishing a collaborative working group to improve communication among employees, implementing a new system for ensuring that the housing maintenance needs of its seasonal immigrant workers are met, and creating a bonus program for employees.
The company plans to begin implementing the three new programs when its next group of seasonal employees arrive, which Payne said is tentatively scheduled for mid-January.
“The whole program is about stabilizing the agricultural labor force and bettering the jobs and working environment of the agriculture labor force,” said co-owner Amy Lane.
Puckett Greenhouses’ award was part of $50 million altogether given to 141 awardees in 40 states and Puerto Rico.
Four other businesses in Virginia received grants. Ballard Fish & Oyster Co. in Chincoteague and Bloomia, a flower grower in King George County, were awarded $600,000 each. Amy’s Garden, an organic farm in Charles City County, and Bellair Farm, a vegetable and livestock farm in Albemarle County, were awarded $100,000 each.
“These awards will largely support small and mid-sized farms to ensure they can hire and retain the workers they need to be competitive in the market, while also lifting up rural communities across the country,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in the USDA news release.
Tackling labor challenges
Lane and Payne are co-owners of the family business along with their parents, Dale and Debby Puckett.
Lane’s husband, Billy Lane, oversees construction of the greenhouses while Payne’s husband, Josh Payne, manages the customer relations side of construction.
Puckett Greenhouses has annual sales of about 30,000 hanging baskets, 10,000 ferns, about 1,000 fruit trees and hundreds of thousands — “close to a million” — of bedding plants and vegetable starters in trays of several dozen apiece, Lane said.
Each fall, Puckett Greenhouses sells about 30,000 chrysanthemums. The company’s delivery trucks run multiple times a week around Virginia and into North Carolina and West Virginia.
The company has a regular staff of about 35 employees, plus a seasonal workforce whose numbers fluctuate based on need and the number of eligible applicants, Payne said.
Finding enough local workers to fill the seasonal jobs has been difficult, she said, and the COVID-19 pandemic only made it worse.
Despite the challenges, she said, “The agricultural world has to go on.”
The company has closed some of its labor gap through automation, such as adding machines that drop seeds into planting trays and transfer seedlings from one tray to another.
Puckett Greenhouses tries to hire seasonal workers locally when it can, but it has been difficult to find people willing to work long days, performing the physical labor that agricultural work demands, Payne said.
Last year, Puckett Greenhouses hired four seasonal H-2A — the federal government’s classification for temporary agricultural workers — employees from Mexico, which Lane said has been “life-changing.”
“If you’re able to fulfill your labor needs with American workers, that is always the priority,” Lane said. “We want to give Americans all the jobs. But, unfortunately, we can’t fulfill those labor needs, and a lot of other farms have that same problem.”
George Davis, professor and interim head of Virginia Tech’s Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, said one of the key challenges that farms face is the fact that agricultural labor is seasonal.
“You have down times out of season,” Davis said. “Are you going to be able to maintain your labor payroll out of season? This is a general principle across all industries that have seasonal demand or seasonal supply, is that it makes it much harder to have a consistent labor force because you’re having to carry that labor force across the years.”
Agricultural work is also “extremely hard,” he said.
“In the agricultural sector, especially if it’s outside, it’s just extremely demanding work, and when there’s a labor shortage across industries, you may prefer to go work at Wendy’s as opposed to walking through a potato field, even if you’re getting paid a little bit less,” Davis said.
Creating collaboration
As part of its recent federal grant award, Puckett Greenhouses plans to establish a collaborative working group within its business to improve communication among the company’s regular staff and seasonal workers.
A group of employees will meet monthly to discuss their progress on projects, safety, training and other matters.
The group of eight to 10 people will include a rotation to ensure that every type of job in the business is represented, and every group meeting will have at least one H-2A employee represented.
“If we don’t know that something’s broke, we don’t know how to fix it, so we want everyone to have a time where they can say, this is right or this is wrong, without repercussions for it,” Lane said.
Streamlining worker housing maintenance
One requirement of the H-2A program is that the employer provides housing for the workers.
The four men who first came on board last year stay in a three-bedroom house where Lane used to live. It’s less than a mile from the greenhouse business.
“It’s nothing fancy or anything like that, but it’s a warm home in the winter and a cool home in the summer,” Lane said. “They each have their own space and their own bedding, and a nice kitchen to cook meals in, and a place to wash and dry their clothes. We would never expect them to live in anything less than what they’re living in.”
Of course, all housing requires periodic maintenance. So, Puckett Greenhouses’ second goal through the federal pilot program is to set up a checklist system: One person staying in the house will fill out a weekly record of needs, they’ll hand it in to a designated employee in the office, and it will then be that employee’s responsibility to ensure the needs are met.
“We chose that for them to be able to feel like they have a way to request things that they need or tell us that there are issues without feeling like they are bothering us, or they don’t want to complain,” Payne said.
A new bonus program
Finally, the greenhouse business plans to implement a more defined bonus program, something that’s been on its to-do list for a while.
The company has given out bonuses before, but they’ve generally been across the board.
“We’ve given out bonuses in the past, but we’ve never really laid out a program for how you earn a bonus,” Lane said.
The new program will lay out guidelines that show each employee what their potential end-of-season bonus would be based on.
“With the grant, it gave us an opportunity to set this program in place,” Payne said.
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Matt Busse is the business reporter for Cardinal News. Matt spent nearly 19 years at The News & Advance,… More by Matt Busse 
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