Most orchid nurseries were vertically integrated. By this, I mean that they did their own hybridizing, seed germination, flasking, growing young plants and finally growing larger plants to flowering. Vertical integration can work well if you are a small company with limited production of proprietary varieties, and closely managed with a secure retail customer base. When the numbers of plants start to increase to the millions it becomes a very difficult problem to manage.

Now, most aspects of the orchid production are done by specialists in their particular fields. Hybridizers spend most of their time and energy on hybridizing and selecting plants that will be mass produced. Laboratories deal exclusively with the seed germination and flasking along with cloning of very high quality plants. Young plant specialists deal with the process of taking the plants from the in-vitro state (in flask) to the in-vivo state (in the nursery environment), and then there are the finishers who bring the plants to flowering. Each party to this program does what he or she does best and doesn’t get bogged down with aspects of production with which they are less likely to be successful. In 1998 the United States Department of Agriculture, who keep statistics on ornamental horticulture production within the United States didn’t even recognize orchids as a category. In 2000 the United States Department of Agriculture ranked orchids as the second most valuable ornamental horticultural crop in the United States. Quite a jump, from obscurity to number two in just a few years!

Twenty years ago if you had a really nice plant you might be able to clone it and sell 500 plants at US$50.00 each for flowering size plants in the hobbyist market. With this scenario high a quality plant may be worth US$2,500.00 less the cost of production. Today if you have a very nice plant that fits the consumer market demand, production criteria, and is exclusively yours, and you can meet all the criteria of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, you may be able to produce, and sell, 500,000 plants a year for several years. This kind of production would be world wide at a retail price of US$15.00. This would be very difficult for a single company to sell plants worldwide, but I think you get the idea of the scale of plants being sold today as compared to twenty years ago.

We, here at The OrchidWorks, are hybridizers and young plant producers. We sell over a million young plants per year in the United States market. We think that there are companies in Europe and Asia that would like to produce our plants, and in fact, have over the years in a modest way done just that. We want to put our plants into those markets in a significant way. We also want to be compensated for our years of effort in breeding and sorting through thousands of plant, often discarding thousands to the compost pile, to find just the right one. The best plant that fits all the criteria of the consumer, the retailers, and the growers demand for a fast and easy growing production plant.

Once a plant is sold, it becomes the property of the buyer and he or she can do with it as they please unless some of those rights are withheld. The only right we want to withhold is the right to reproduce it without compensating the originator. This one right compensates us as breeders and also encourages us to keep breeding new and exciting plants for the growers.

To be specific let’s talk about Oncidium Sweet Ears ‘The OrchidWorks’Ⓟ. This plant came from a cross Mr. James McCully, the previous owner of The OrchidWorks, made on October 4, 1994. We registered the cross in 1998, and selected several varieties that we thought were suitable for pot plant production. One of the many rules of patents in the United States is that the plant must be proven to replicate without mutation. In order to satisfy this rule we first had to clone the plant and grow the plants up to flowering and photograph the progeny clones and the original mother plant to prove that, in deed, the plant did reproduce clones that were like the mother plant. This process takes about four years. With this accomplished we then prepared the patent application and submitted it to the United States Patent and Trademark Office in 2004. The patent was subsequently granted to Mr. McCully.

Now that we have some control of the future of the plants production we can license others across the world, for a small fee, to produce the plant. This process insures high quality plants in the worldwide marketplace for years to come. Glen Barfield, General Manager The OrchidWorks glen@theorchidworks.com http://www.theorchidworks.com