Important info regarding KA's dahlias

The KA (KA’s aka Santa Cruz Dahlias) varieties may have some restrictions. We cannot give legal advice on this subject, so please do your own research. The legalities are very complicated, so we have decided to proceed in an alternative manner that we feel is appropriate for our farm and our family. 

We haven’t yet decided if we will sell KA varieties in the future. We will continue to grow a few of their varieties as they are some of the most stunning varieties on the market. However, at this time, we are selling off most of our stock to recoup our investment. We have invested several thousand dollars over the past few years to build our KA collection and would like to recoup that investment as we had originally planned.

We respect all of the work that hybridizers do to bring these varieties to market, so we did not want to change the variety names or remove the “KA” from the variety name. We have chosen not to become a KA “licensed seller”, so we cannot use the newly trademarked name. We are just not comfortable signing any contracts with SCD at this time and hope that you can respect our position. We may voluntarily contribute a percentage of the sales to the hybridizer, as we plan to do with all hybridizers (even the free market hybridizers). We want to support the work of all hybridizers, but are still trying to navigate how to do so in a way that’s beneficial for all parties involved.

In March of 2024, Santa Cruz Dahlias reached out to us regarding their royalty program. As a former financial auditor and underwriter that worked in the financial sector for over two decades, it was clear that we would end up taking a huge loss if we paid 25% of our sales as royalties. We don’t even retain 25% ourselves. Although their royalty percentage has since changed to 10% as of October 2024, we still have some reservations and feel more comfortable waiting as this situation will continue to evolve. During that email conversation, we asked SCD if we could voluntarily contribute a lesser amount and they responded with the following statement. The manner we chose to proceed, for the time being, with our KA stock is based on this written statement: