All cut flowers, regardless of how big or small the farm is, must be harvested by hand. Unlike certain vegetable crops that can be harvested by specialized machinery when the farm is scaled large enough, flowers are too delicate for machines to pick. Someone cuts every single stem. At the scale of the global cut flower industry, that means that cheap flowers depend on exploiting people’s labor. The name is a constant reminder of the enormous amount of work it takes to grow and harvest flowers and most anything else, inside of a globalized agricultural system that tries to make us forget it.

Finally, the name By Hand Farm is an homage to, an honoring of, all the farmers and landworkers of the world, past and present, who for so long did their work without the help of fossil fuel machinery, that double edged sword.