Next great crop in Alaska is a beauty

Here’s a quick word-association quiz for you. What do you think of when you read “peony?”

The first word that pops in my head is “ant.” I grew up with lovely peony plants in the yard of our south-central Michigan farm home, and they were always covered in busy ants.

Forget the ants. Peony may soon be synonymous with Alaska.

While it may seem like a leap from ants to Alaska, the Division of Agriculture sees Alaska filling a need in the flourishing market for peonies. Peonies, which need a winter chilling, do well in temperate and even subarctic climates, including many areas of Alaska.

Peony propagators are prolific on the Peninsula (OK, that may be an exaggeration but it works with the alliteration) and in the Fairbanks area, and there is an increasing interest in peonies in the Mat-Su area, including Talkeetna. According to Amy Pettit from the Division of Agriculture, a survey done by the Division estimates there will be about 80,000 peony plants in Alaska by 2010. It takes three to four years for a peony plant to mature. Once it is mature, it will put out about 10 flowers per plant.

Because peonies are popular for floral arrangements, particularly for weddings, those stems can wholesale for up to $3 apiece. The late-season peonies —currently in late June — generally fetch the highest rates.

And that’s where Pettit said Alaska peony producers can cash in. Alaska’s season would come after that of the Northwest United States and before that of New Zealand, which doesn’t put out a new season of peonies until about Christmas time.

That long peony drought — from about July 1 to mid December — would give Alaska growers about six to eight weeks of market exclusivity within the projected growing season, a farmer’s dream.

“There is a market there,” said Pettit, who, along with her boss, Doug Warner, manager of the division’s Marketing and Inspection department, attended a peony conference in May.

Of course, as Pettit points out, there are still some issues to be ironed out. The industry isn’t accustomed to having a peony supply during the late summer, so while demand is likely to be strong, there is no guarantee. Alaska hasn’t shipped peonies before. No one knows how Alaska peonies will be for quality of stem and flower, how they will weather the shipping or how many peonies Alaska farmers can produce.

Pettit and Warner have been working on the peony project for some time. It’s just one of their efforts to help Alaska farmers find niche markets to make their production profitable. Competing head to head with large producers worldwide just doesn’t work.

In a state with limited agricultural production, and much of that centered around locally consumed vegetables, barley and hay, large-scale flower farming for export sounds more than a little strange.

And can you imagine the reaction of the bride in Florida who finds out her shipment of showy peonies for her big day is being overnight shipped from Alaska?

But if you’ve ever seen hundreds of tiny ants milling around the unopened buds of a peony plant, sucking down the sweet sap the flower buds produce, you know sometimes things that seem odd really do work.

If you’d like to learn more about Alaska’s agricultural products, producers and processors, the Division of Agriculture has updated its Alaska Grown directory. It is available in print or downloadable as a searchable Excel file on line. Look for the New Food and Farm Products Directory at www.dnr.state.ak.us/ag.

Victoria Naegele (akaitc@ alaskafb.org) is director of Alaska Agriculture in the Classroom, an agricultural literacy program of the Alaska Farm Bureau. She has two peony plants in her yard in Palmer.