Resource Book on Horticulture Nursery Management

plants, consultancy or sale of various nursery products. This activity of anticipating the
probable expenditure and income heads during a financial year is called budgeting.
Planning of probable operational expenditure like raw material and labour requirement
should be done well in advance to make the nursery business a profitable venture. During
the planning process it is essential to make an estimate of major heads of expenditure and
allocate the funds for the expenditure under various heads. There should be a logical
balance between the need of expenditure on raw material and the labour requirement of a
nursery enterprise.
Any business venture requires proper maintenance of accounts on expenditure and
income. The income from sale of plants in a nursery business is unreliable and fluctuating
depending upon various market factors like demand, season, satisfactory monsoon, etc.
However the expenditure under various heads like the production cost is a necessity and
has to be made irrespective of the demand. Hence expenditure often precedes the income
in the early stages of the venture. Over a period of time as the enterprise matures, the
sales of plants picks up and the income starts rising. At such a stage, judging and
analyzing whether the nursery enterprise is a profitable or a loss making unit becomes
difficult without accounting of expenditure and income. Failure of anticipating the
working capital expenditure might lead to excessive costs. Budgeting facilitates analysis
of the heads on which funds must be spent on priority basis and those which can wait or
do with lesser funds.
By and large, it is necessary to balance various heads of expenditure. Some ratios of
expenditure on raw material and labour must be worked out. Such ratios can help the
nursery entrepreneur to anticipate future requirement of funds and thus efficiently plan
the future expenses. For example, the ratio of expenditure on raw material and labour
should be preferably 3:1 or 2:1. Budgeting is thus an essential exercise in a successful
and profitable nursery enterprise.
� Future Projection of Nursery Enterprise
For a nursery enterprise to be a profitable venture, meticulous planning is required.
This process not only includes the production and supply of grafts and seedlings but also
the strategic marketing efforts in order to reach maximum number of plant lovers.
It is of significance especially in perennial horticultural crops which has a long
gestation period and effects are known only in later stages. In the existing infrastructure,
there are just over 100 big nurseries. A number of Government nurseries also exist in
different states. Planting material is also being produced by the public and private
nurseries which also play important role to meet the requirement of the growers. At
present the number of small and medium scale nurseries is over 6300. Presently only 30-
40% demand of planting material is being met by the existing infrastructure initiatives.
The Working Group on Horticulture and Plantation Crops for the Eleventh Five Year
Plan has projected the total requirement of planting materials of fruits, coconut, cashew,
black paper, tree spices, areca-nut etc. as 2000 million by the year 2012 at a modest
growth rate of 4% per annum. In the segment of fruit crops alone, the projected demand
for the planting material may increase more than 8.5 million grafts by the year 2011-12.
Supply of such a huge quantity of disease free, true to type quality planting material is a
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