The objective of the survey was to sample only larger, strictly commercial firms, representing
a majority of total industry sales volume. This was accomplished by selecting firms from the 1988
Division of Plant Industry (DPI) registry, classified as having woody ornamental products and having
greater than 50,000 units in plant inventory. The 270 firms selected by this process represented a 10%
sampling of the population of registered firms. Questionnaires were sent by mail, with a cover letter
from the trade association (FNGA) president, and an addressed, postage-paid return envelope. A
second mailing 75 days later was sent to 186 firms selected from the FNGA membership list, for
firms with 8 or more full-time employees. This second mailing included 47 of the same firms in the
first mailing, giving an additional 139 firms, for a total of 409 firms contacted.

 Completed questionnaires were received from 104 firms, representing a 25.4 percent response
rate. Returned questionnaires were forwarded to the project leader at Univ. of Tennessee, where
data were entered and checked. Compiled data were then returned to the authors for further analysis.

 Analysis of all data was performed for firms categorized by annual sales volume: small, less
than $500 thousand; medium, $500 thousand to $1 million; large, $1 million to $3 million; very large,
greater than $3 million. In ten cases where sales figures were not reported, sales were estimated
from employment data by applying average sales per employee from the entire data set. Incomplete
data for other questions were not adjusted, and percentage results presented in tables below represent
actual reported totals.


 Results

Industry Size and Value

 Total industry sales reported by survey respondents for 1988 were $125 million (Table 1).
This value is 59% of woody ornamentals industry sales estimated by Hodges (1989), based upon
expansion of labor employment and payroll data. The number of firms in each size class were as
follows: 38 small, 25 medium, 31 large, 9 very large, 1 unknown.
 The woody ornamentals industry in Florida is generally an un-concentrated industry,
compared to other U.S. agribusiness and to floriculture industries (Hodges & Haydu, 1990). Small
and medium sized firms comprised 21 percent of total industry sales reported in this survey, while
large firms represented 40% of sales, and very large firms 39% of sales (Table 1). However, because
the sampling procedure was biased in favor of larger firms, the actual market share of smaller firms
is greater than indicated here.

 Table 1--Number of Firms and Product Sales by Firm Size Class,
 104 woody ornamental nurseries in Florida, 1988.

 Firm Number Sales Percent Avg. Sales
 Size Firms Total Per Firm
 Class ($1,000) ($1,000)

 Small 38 8,973 7.2% 236
 Medium 25 17,657 14.1% 706
 Large 31 49,962 40.0% 1,612
 Very Large 9 48,311 38.7% 5,368

 Overall 103 124,904 100.0% 1,213