Low-priced nursery stock is piling up: when will it finally sell well?

With the real estate market in continued downturn and municipal engineering projects shelved, the nursery stock industry, which was booming just a few years ago, has taken a big hit. Many seedling growers complain that their nursery stock cannot be sold and look everywhere for opportunities to sell it. Some impatient, impulsive people even cut down the seedlings they worked so hard to cultivate and burned them as firewood, then looked at the bare nursery and did not know what varieties of seedlings to plant. For a time, the industry was filled with pessimism and confusion.

Although a series of policies have seriously affected the development of the nursery stock industry, the government has not indicated that China's urban greening construction will come to a halt, and the direction of urban construction development proposed at the 18th National Congress and the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee shows that there is still a lot of room in the nursery stock market. The influence and role of the landscape nursery stock industry in ecological civilization, Beautiful China and new-type urbanization construction will become increasingly prominent.

At this point, some people will ask: since there is such a broad market, why does this phenomenon of “can't sell seedlings, can't buy seedlings” still appear? It mainly comes down to the issue of market laws: when there are more products, prices naturally fall. On closer analysis, it is because in recent years nursery scales have expanded rapidly, with nurseries being set up in a big way everywhere, but a large number of seedlings leaving the nursery did not enter the terminal market of landscaping projects; instead, they were stockpiled in other nurseries. Nursery stock is severely homogenized: when word spreads in the market that something sells well and has potential, a large group of people immediately follows the trend and plants it for quick profits, while few are patient enough to cultivate premium nursery stock. Industry information is asymmetric, structural contradictions are prominent, and production and application are seriously disconnected.

⟦NL> In the final analysis, the fundamental predicament of the nursery stock industry still comes from the characteristics of nursery stock itself. Cyclicality——it takes a long time for nursery stock to go from planting to market, and during this period the market changes too much; by the time seedlings of a variety that sold at a high price a few years ago are ready, the market is no longer what it was. Regionality——the nursery stock market is large or small depending on how you look at it; although there are countless kinds of nursery stock in the world, each region has tree species best suited to local conditions. Strictly speaking, the nursery stock market is very large, but the market for each tree species is still rather limited. Therefore, the same variety may sell well and fetch a high price in one place, while in another place it is far inferior or even unsellable. As for these two points, most seedling growers are often dazzled by currently hot-selling varieties and ignore them as soon as their heads get hot.

Overall, for nursery stock varieties that were heavily used before, if they do not have obvious characteristics that make them obsolete, such as being prone to pests, difficult to maintain, or having their advantages overshadowed by new varieties, then basically the current market is just saturated; after a few years, as stockpiles decrease, prices will rise again. In this regard, seedling growers do not need to worry; they only need to cultivate patiently and wait for prices to recover. For nursery stock already planted and awaiting sale that shows a trend of being replaced by new varieties in engineering applications, it should be carefully cultivated and sold at the right time.