Stretched across the quiet vastness of Miami’s agricultural district, Costa Farms boasts 2,000 acres—roughly 1,500 football fields’ worth of plants: prickly cacti, hot pink desert roses, butter-yellow allamandas, Christmas palms, Chinese evergreens and more. And in the middle of it all is Maria Costa-Smith’s office, where, hanging on the wall is an unassuming black-and-white picture of her grandfather, Jose Antonio Costa, the Cuban farmer with a second-grade education who, after emigrating to the U.S. in 1961, bought 61 acres and founded a company that has become the country’s largest indoor plant producer and one of its largest producers of bedding plants.
“He was a visionary,” company part owner Costa-Smith says, smiling at the photograph, in which Abuelo is packing tomatoes. He wasn’t the only one. Two more generations of Costas—Costa-Smith’s father Jose Antonio Jr., or Tony, who runs the company’s Dominican Republic operations; her brother, also named Jose Antonio, who is in charge of the foliage division; and Costa-Smith, who oversees bedding, sustainability, research and development, and IT departments, plus her husband, CEO Jose Smith—have shepherded the multimillion-dollar company to its 50th anniversary this year by looking to the future and taking risks.
The payoff: The company, which employs 3,100 people and also has operations in North Carolina and China, for a total of 3,500 acres under cultivation, supplies every Lowe’s in the country with plants and has an annual revenue, of, well, “a lot,” says Costa-Smith, with a laugh. “In the hundreds of millions.” Enough, she says, to make it possible for Costa Farms to buy a struggling Miami plant supplier with $40 million annual revenue at auction earlier this year. “We’re very blessed,” she says.
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