Anderson’s Seed and Garden Store: Reaping what they’ve sown

Facing the future is a trying task for many businesses, but by embracing the past, Anderson’s Seed and Garden Store has managed to establish itself as the one-stop shop for home growers in the Logan, Utah, area.

In a part of the state rich in farming history, Anderson’s is deeply rooted in the grower’s culture. Co-owner Mark Anderson says his grandmother first founded the company in the form of Logan Seed and Feed in 1942. By serving several nearby farming operations, the business rapidly grew to occupy its current location in the center of downtown Logan.

“She would go out and broker seed for farmers,” Anderson says. “Of course, we’re in a very rural area so everybody had their own little gardens and farms. So her business started up that way. As it started to grow, she rented a little bit more space and increased and just did everything she could to keep her business going. By the ’60s, she had bought more property and had expanded, and it was Anderson’s Seed and Feed at that point.”

Eventually expanding into home garden goods, the business was passed down to Anderson’s parents before he and his wife, Ronnette, bought the store in 1999. They have owned and operated it ever since.

After taking ownership, Anderson and his wife oversaw a period of dramatic growth within the business. Staffing swelled from a handful of family members to 25 full-time and seasonal employees, services expanded and sales rose steadily.

“My parents had the best year they’d ever had with the garden center at that point in 1998, and they did $400,000 in business that year,” Anderson says. “By 2000, we were up to a million. By 2002, we were about $1.2 or $1.3 million. We did some major expansions, we put in some Nexus greenhouses and reconfigured, but still kept that old seed and feed farm store feel.”

In its landlocked downtown location, Anderson’s has little space to expand further and invest in greenhouse and nursery space. The store currently includes between 10,000 and 15,000 square feet of nursery space, 10,000 square feet of greenhouses and roughly 7,000 square feet of retail space.

Although large-scale farms are less common now than they were in the 1940s, Anderson’s Seed and Garden Center continues to deal heavily in seeds, which anchors their revenues and helps maintain an old-time seed and feed store atmosphere. Seeds are still weighed in front of customers with the same scales Anderson’s grandmother opened the store with. A large local Mormon population also means there is an abundance of home gardeners in need of seeds each season.

“The seeds are essential to our business because we just don’t have the room to carry a lot of nursery stock,” Anderson says. “The way our culture is, everybody kind of has a garden, whether it’s a small raised garden or containers or a 5,000-square-foot traditional garden. We’ve provided them with the necessary seeds to keep their gardens going every year for almost 74 years.”

With exponential growth as a business often comes problems with training, oversight and payroll, as Anderson found out when he began growing his staff and services in the early 2000s.

“It was very difficult to handle that kind of growth,” Anderson says. “Getting more employees and handling the kind of logistics that we dealt with early on … sometimes, too much growth can kill you. We experienced really rapid growth as we expanded and didn’t know how to handle it and learned as we went.”

However, a dedication to knowledgeable and friendly service, as well as ambitious ventures into new fields such as pest control, landscaping and online ordering, has carried Anderson’s into the modern age of seed and garden retail.

“What really differentiates us from all of our competition is people know that they can come here and get an answer to their problem,” Anderson says. “Lots of diagnoses on pests and diseases, environmental stresses. When people have problems, they come here because they know they can get an answer for their problem and then we may provide them a product to assist them. We’re the answer place.”