Plukkerz: Lessons from Growing Organic Flowers

On September 6, our Flowers team visited , a small organic flower-growing initiative in the Netherlands. The visit offered valuable insights into the opportunities and challenges of building a sustainable business in the organic flower sector. The farm was established in 2022 and benefited from one key advantage: the land was already organically certified when founders Eddy and Ciska began their adventure.
This meant they could immediately market their flowers as organic, avoiding the two- to three-year transition period that deters many conventional farmers from switching. During this transition, production usually decreases while prices remain the same, which often makes the switch economically unviable. For Plukkerz, certification was largely an administrative and financial hurdle, but it allowed them to enter the market with an organic label from day one.

Plukkerz first set out to sell weekly subscription bouquets directly to consumers, planting 50 different flower varieties to guarantee diversity. But building a stable customer base proved too slow, so they shifted to supplying florists and auctions. This move allowed them to focus on growing rather than arranging bouquets, and quickly led to stronger, more reliable partnerships. Today, their network includes about 16 florists, wholesalers, and platforms like , which connects organic growers with local florists and consumers.

Organic growing comes with specific difficulties. Without synthetic pesticides, weed and pest control relies heavily on manual labor, biodiversity, and soil health. Eddy and Ciska stressed that their greatest challenge is maintaining healthy soil. To do this, they incorporate compost and manure, plant cover crops, and keep the soil covered with living roots whenever possible. They are moving away from practices such as long-term tarping, which reduces soil life, and instead focus on maximizing photosynthesis and organic matter. For them, everything starts with the soil: healthy soil means healthier plants, which in turn are more resistant to diseases and pests.
Another major challenge for Plukkerz is the cost and complexity of obtaining and maintaining organic grower certification. Even though recent changes reduced annual fees for small farms earning under €80,000, the process still requires paying for inspections, exemptions, and extra paperwork. For example, when they buy conventional tubers that will only become organic the following season, they must request and pay for formal exemptions. For Ciska and Eddy, this creates an uneven playing field: while organic farmers pay to prove they grow without chemicals, conventional farmers often avoid these costs.

They also highlighted a broader challenge: most consumers do not really understand what “organic” means. A high percentage of customers are often unaware of what is included in organic certification. Many simply assume that bouquets on supermarket shelves are safe and overlook the intensive use of pesticides in conventional farming. In their view, the lack of public awareness limits the growth of the organic market, both for food and for flowers. People are often shocked to learn, for example, that conventional onions may be sprayed up to twenty times in a single season. Yet while they notice public resistance to pesticide use in ornamental flowers in the Netherlands (the “not in my backyard” attitude), there appears to be far less concern when it comes to food crops.


For Plukkerz, the solution lies in education and awareness-building, especially among younger generations. They believe that reconnecting children with the basics of farming, teaching them how soil works, how plants grow, and what it means to cultivate without chemicals, could lead to long-term changes in consumer choices and policy. Without this cultural shift, organic farming will remain a niche market struggling to compete with cheap mass imports.
"Tackling gender inequality and sustainability in agribusiness" is one of the signature projects that are part of the strategic theme Pathways to Sustainability.