Bogota Blogger

My friend Ines Cristina, a teacher at my school, has a flower farm just outside the city, near the town called La Calera. Well, it’s not her farm–she and her husband own a piece of it, along with her husband’s brother and some others. La Calera, by the way, I always thought was the name of the mountain just above Calle 84, with lots of cool restaurants and clubs and a popular place on weekend days for bicyclists and brunchers. Now I know that i’s actually the name of a little town on the other side of the mountain.

Selling Roses all over the World

This farm is called Matina Flowers (the Italian word for morning) and grows roses only. Seventy-five percent of the roses sold in the US come from Colombia, but this farm also sells roses in Spain, Germany, and Russia. Ines says it’s important not to put yourself in a position of relying solely on the US market. Makes sense to me. They sell 30% in the US, 30% in Russia, and the rest in Europe and various other places.

It was interesting to hear about the Russian market. Russians like very, very, very long-stemmed roses will full heads, which means they take longer to grow, which means they cost more, so the growers are happy to get Russian business. According to Ines, buying long-stemmed roses is a sign of prestige in Russia, but then when they get to the house, they have to cut the stems short because, “Russians all live in such small places.”

It seems like the farm is always trying experiments with varieties and techniques for getting longer stems and fuller heads. So, maybe the Russians are driving the trend in the marketing of roses.

In the US (and in other places, too), tastes in roses change every now and then. So, the farm has to be constantly changing varieties, colors, fullness, height, etc. to meet the changing demands. At Matinas, I think they are currently growing something like 5 or 6 varieties of roses in a couple of colors.

The biggest season by far is, of course, Valentine’s Day. After that, but farrrrrrrrr after that, is Mother’s Day. Then Christmas, and apparently there’s a kind of stretched-out busy season in the fall–September and October.

The Economics of a Rose Farm

This farm produces around five million roses a year. Jorge, Ines’s husband, told me they have close to 500,000 plants, and each plant can produce about one rose a month. Some grow more quickly, and some (the long stems) might even need two to three months. The most they can charge for a rose is about $0.65 ( a long, long stem, full head, in-demand variety, and beautiful shape), and the weakest ones go for about $0.09. Some, that are in bad shape, are just composted on the farm.

Matinas employs something like 80 people, most of them women, to tend the roses, cut and package them. A lot of the women are single heads of households, and this is a pretty good living for them. They have a little cafeteria with a tienda on sight, but most women bring their lunches from home. In the greenhouses, everybody is responsible for tending a certain number of rows of roses, and some others work in the packaging process. 

Everything is pretty low tech in the packaging–the stems are measured and cut by hand, roses bundled into boxes or packages, and processed all by hand. There’s a wooden board marked off in measurements with a type of  hook on the top to hold the head of the rose, and then as much of the stem as possible is preserved, and groups of roses with the same stem lengths are bundled together.

We were there on a Sunday, so there were only two workers around, to do the watering and a few other small chores. It would be fascinating to go during a regular workday to see the whole place in action.

Also interesting is that the plants are changed out every couple of years, mostly because tastes in roses change, and they need to bring in new varieties and colors. Stems are rooted, and the new varieties are grafted onto them once they’re strong enough. Most of the designers of new varieties are in Germany, or at least in Europe, and when a new rose is created, it is basically patented, and the farm has to pay about $1 per plant.

Of course, it would be possible for an unscrupulous farmer to graft new roses and not pay for many of the plants, but apparently the designers have a pretty efficient system for keeping track. They have people who come inspect the farms to see how many of a certain variety are there, and they work backwards from the sales figures to estimate how many plants a certain farm has of a particular variety. Also, there are spies.

Why Roses in Bogota?

One reason roses are grown in Bogota (and many other flowers in various parts of Colombia) for sale all around the world is that the climate is fairly consistent year-round. Freezes just about never happen, and the temperature is pretty consistent year-round–maybe 50-ish at night and 68-72 during the hottest few hours of the day. Another factor, that I hadn’t considered before this, is that, with the altitude, there is not much of a problem with fungi and molds and those sorts of things that rose plants are sensitive to.

Getting the Roses to Market

There are many daily flights from El Dorado Airport to the US and Europe and other parts of the world just loaded with roses. The quicker a rose can be in the store, the longer it will last, and therefore the more it’s worth. Roses headed to the US almost always go to Miami, and from there to other distribution centers, then to the stores, hopefully within just a few days from when they are harvested.

So, how much does a bouquet of a dozen of the best looking long-stemmed red roses cost at Valentine’s Day in New York City? I have no clue–$100? $150? more?, but if you bought it here on this rose farm, it would be about $8.00.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 9:25 pm and is filed under Tourist Stuff in Bogota, Daily Life in Bogota. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.