5 minute read
RICHARD JOHNSON'S TREE BET
ACORN HUNTER
ENTREPRENEUR RICHARD JOHNSON FINDS HIS LATEST VENTURE AMONG THE LIVE OAKS
STORY & PHOTO BY JOHANNA F. STILL
Meet Richard Johnson 3.0. The one-time, big-city business titan of HotJobs.com fame has evolved into his latest stage, one he calls “social entrepreneurism.”
The first Johnson prototype was a man brimming with innovation, hustle and ill-advised risk. In ’99, he mortgaged his home to buy a 30-second Super Bowl ad for his company, the commercial costing nearly half the site’s total annual revenues. The trick paid off, garnering press coverage, driving up HotJobs’ notoriety and use. Yahoo bought it two years later for $458 million.
His second self-iteration involved creating nonprofits, notably founding Masonboro.org in 2009.
Today’s Johnson is engulfed in a series of social endeavors, honing in on a specific purpose. He founded, for one, Burgaw Now in 2019, which is infusing select businesses with capital and mentorship in an effort to boost foot traffic in the downtown rural square.
Tucked away off Stag Park Road in Burgaw, Johnson spends most of his business energy at Penderlea Farms, a 500-acre property he initially bought to play around at in 2016 in an auction. “I think every kid growing up in Pennsylvania in the middle of nowhere wants a farm,” he said. It was a place he could bring his four daughters, skeet shoot, ride ATVs, host campfires.
Before he bought it, the property was home to the late David Howard’s Burgaw Creek Nursery; Johnson made use of the lines of young oaks already there from the old nursery, bought a tree spade and began moving them around the property to his liking, framing a freshly dug pond.
After juggling other crop ideas, it took him two years and 11 months to realize the farm should remain a nursery.
This nursery would be different. A marketing guru, Johnson positioned Penderlea Farms as protagonist to a villain: Floridian Cathedral live oaks, the foremost oak sought by landscapers and nurseries in the region. A genetically altered lineage favored by developers, Cathedrals grow straight up, bred to rid the plant of its parent’s gnarling, winding character, according to Johnson. He said he finds the proliferation of genetically altered live oaks in the region “offensive.”
“Friends don’t let friends buy Florida trees,” Penderlea’s unofficial tagline goes.
Penderlea live oaks are exclusively grown from local North Carolina native oaks, preferably at least a century old. Johnson has secured agreements with a swath of property owners to stow away acorns from worthy live oaks in the region: Fort Fisher’s canopy, Hampstead’s George Washington (the chained-off Highway 17 landmark), Wrightsville Beach loop’s oaks, the Airlie Oak and its sisters.
While riding the perimeter one Wednesday last month, Johnson pulled an abrupt U-turn, apologized for being obsessive-compulsive and tracked down a worker in the field to make sure branches weren’t pruned any higher than about shoulder height. Penderlea trees will be pruned less than industry standard, Johnson said, leaving room for crawling, low-lying branches to flourish.
Though he’ll still maintain a batch of trees pruned to current nursery standards, for now, Johnson said landscapers aren’t yet interested in his more unique collection.
“It will take them a while to get them to convert to: Not every tree needs to be a cookie-cutter tree for my development,” he said.
This year, Johnson personally collected 10,000 acorns. About 30,000 are stowed in a refrigerator on the farm, waiting to be cycled in as staff plant about 500 a day. Not all take root, but those that do make it out of the greenhouse and into the ground.
In September, Johnson was desperate. Acorn production was dry (last year, he swept up 500 from the Airlie Oak; this year, it gave him just two). Wrightsville Beach Brewery’s flagship beauty secured the season when he stowed away 3,000 acorns in one day. “That saved us,” he said. “Every single one of these has to live.”
In 2019, his first season collecting, he unintentionally torched thousands of acorns while experimenting with a heating process to rid the nuts of a pesky larvae. “Mass casualty,” he said. (He has since dialed in the stovetop pest repellent routine.)
Johnson admits he had no idea what he was doing getting into the nursery business. He’s leaned on Dave Jordan as a mentor, who previously owned North American Nursery Inc., also in Burgaw, while a restless mind drives the rest.
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It takes five years to grow a 2.5-inch caliper tree, sold in a 25-gallon bucket – the standard size sought by developers, typically the starting point in landscaping plans. He’s halfway there: “Two-and-ahalf years from now, we’ll find out whether this whole shebang works.”
He said he’s losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on the enterprise. Still, he has a degree of confidence in its eventual success, and as someone who doesn’t need to make money, he has no profit motive, though he’d like to break even. “Not everything has to be a zero-sum game,” he said.
So far, a few nurseries and landscapers have caught onto what Johnson’s doing, though he won’t be truly open for business on the retail side until his first propagated batch reaches 2.5 inches by summer 2023 (Penderlea is open by appointment only for customers interested in smaller oaks in the meantime). For his plan to work, he’ll have to sell 4,000 trees a year, targeting a mostly wholesale audience.
“If we can get to 25% retail, we might even be a little profitable,” he said.
With the time and resources to do next to anything, why choose live oaks?
Johnson aims to change landscapers’ buying habits by driving demand on the retail side, with customers demanding distinctive Penderlea trees over Cathedrals. Like his other 3.0 undertakings, Johnson is toying with the code to imbue a noticeable societal shift. If Penderlea catches on, he hopes to restore the region’s landscaping for decades to come.
