All sorts of plant life seems to be thriving at TNT Greenhouse.
The business itself seems to be thriving as well, when the Fort Madison Chamber Ambassadors visited for a ribbon cutting on Friday.
TNT Greenhouse is owned by cousins Ted Goldie and Ty Louck. Together, Goldie and Louck bought Matt’s Greenhouse, then-owned by Fort Madison Mayor Matt Mohrfeld.
“This has been a couple-year process, pushing Matt Mohrfeld out,” Goldie said to the laughter of listeners. “For those of you who might not know, I’ve worked for Matt for almost 15 years as an operations manager.”
Goldie said it all came together on Aug. 1 of 2023.
“We finally talked Matt into selling it to us. Matt’s been a great mentor and has been a lot of help in the process,” he said. “He’s staying on-board for a couple years to help the transition. It’s been a great collaboration.”
TNT (named for Ted and Ty) Greenhouse sells plants all over the midwest, Goldie said.
“We are partners with a top-10 greenhouse in the nation, called Dan & Jerry’s. We do a lot of business with them,” he said. “It’s been a great partnership with them. A lot of people here it’s been really important to.”
Louck said when he found out Mohrfeld was thinking about retiring, “we talked that it’s the next logical step is to buy it and keep it locally and continue on with what we were doing. So that’s just how it got going. Glad to be a part of it.”
Goldie said Mohrfeld mentioned that the business injects over a million dollars in payroll in the area.
“So it’s a big deal,” he said. “Very proud of that.”
There are around 80 employees working for TNT Greenhouse. There are 10 acres of growing space between three locations and drivers are on the road six days a week, making deliveries.
On average, around 30 stores are serviced a day, with 13 trucks on the road. Customers also pick up items at the greenhouse, located at 2094 303rd Avenue.
“So what you see all of our workers doing today, they’re picking orders for tomorrow,” Goldie said. “We’ll pick orders today, push them on a truck tonight, they go out tomorrow to all of the respective stores that we’re servicing tomorrow. That might be through Illinois, That might be Iowa Falls, Iowa, that might be St. Louis, Mo.”
Goldie said TNT Greenhouse services Fort Madison’s Hy-Vee and Huffman’s and has a garden center at Fareway, as well as Blaine’s Farm and Fleet, Mill’s Fleet Farm and “mom and pop” places in the area as well as other businesses in around a 200-mile radius.
An indispensable partnership of the business, Goldie said, has been Bartlett Instruments.
“They provide all of our environmental controls. So everything that we do is controlled by a Bartlett controller. It controls the heat, the cooling, all of that,” he said. “And so we can look at it from wherever we are in the world as long as we have internet. That collaboration started with Matt many, many years ago.”
Mohrfeld said he is proud how the business transitioned to a local group with Goldie and Louck.
“They’re both very good operators. Ty’s got a lot of growing skills and a good, even temperament and Ted’s got long office work, organizational skills,” he said. “There’s a lot of moving parts here.”
Mohrfeld said there are 26 Mexican people working at the greenhouse under the H-2A program.
“Seven, eight years ago, I sat the staff down and said ‘if we can’t get help, I’m quitting.’ Said it loud and clear,” he said. “And we started embracing the H-2A program. And it’s been a godsend.”
The H-21 program, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services program services, “allows U.S. Employers or U.S. Agents who meet specific regulatory requirements to bring foreign nationals to the United States to fill temporary agricultural jobs.”
“They’re on a five month work order,” Mohrfeld said. “We just couldn’t reach into our pool and get them. It’s a pretty neat program. The H-2A program is the biggest legal Visa program in the United States and it’s for agricultural workers.”
