We’re no strangers to a good auction here in Texas. Time was, every little town had an auction barn and a livestock auction every week. These barns typically had a little cafe out front (sometimes open all week), and they were the place to see your neighbors and get a good ol’ chicken fried steak. But cattle prices fell through the floor in the last decade, and what with all the urban encroachment, many auctions have closed their doors. Blanco County lost theirs several years ago.
There are other kinds of cattle auctions in Texas, though. These are the kind where the rich and famous hang out. Once Frank was working at a large (as in 10,000 acres) ranch owned by one of the big oil companies here in Texas. He was doing some custom grafting in their vineyards. This ranch was mainly a dude ranch for the oil company executives to come out and hunt on, and entertain their business partners and families.
These guys knew how to put on an auction. Along with the vineyards, they had a cattle operation to try to make the ranch pay for itself (a little). These were no ordinary cattle though. And this was no ordinary auction. These were in-vitro fertilized, surrogate mother-raised pedigreed Brangus embryos that were being auctioned off by the share! The crowd looked like a Hollywood version of Texas, with gold chains and $1,000 boots all over the place. There was a bar everywhere you turned, huge water troughs filled with Heineken beer, and heaping plates of barbeque. (Frank was in hog heaven!) When the auction started, they were selling quarter shares of these cows, if you could call them that yet, for tens of thousands of dollars. At one point the bidding was at $50,000 for a half share of some peanut of a cow and Frank raised his hand to scratch his ear. The auctioneer wheeled around on him and scared him so bad he backed right out of that barn and had to have another beer!
In November we went to Vancouver, Canada, for the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers’ annual conference. One of the highlights was a trip to United Flower Growers, the Dutch-style flower auction there. But we’ll tell you right now – those Dutch have got it all wrong. For one thing, they are way too quiet! But we’ll get back to that.
The Vancouver area probably has one the highest concentrations of flower growers in North America. We visited four different growers on the day-long tour. These growers all had common traits. First, they’re all Dutch! The area was first settled by someone named Van Couveran (no lie, we got it off the web site!) and it seems like half the country came with him. Second, these were all smaller operations that specialized in just a few crops. They all had fancy Dutch glass greenhouses. They all believed strongly in the auction system. And all the operations were spotlessly clean.
First stop on the ASCFG tour was Xenios Dutch Growers They grow on about 2 acres in field, glass greenhouses, poly houses, and under shade. These guys raise a lot of lisianthus, along with stocks, tulips and celosia. They are big on using biological control for pests, and they buy in and raise a lot of beneficial insects. There are large pepper plants in the centers of the greenhouse to provide habitat for the aphid predators. The plants are constantly monitored for pests, but there is zero tolerance for pests on the plants and flowers taken to the auction. So in a year that is bad for, say, thrips, the balance of crops/pests/beneficials can be disrupted when they absolutely have to spray. Part of the IPM cycle includes steaming the beds once a year to kill soil pathogens.
Like most greenhouses we saw, the plants are grown very close together. They had 4-foot wide beds. All the growers we saw used a wire floral support netting called Flornet from Holland. At Xenios they used the netting as a guide to plant spacing. For instance they planted 2 lisianthus in each 5-inch square. Stocks were even closer. Tulips were planted about 1.5 inches apart in every direction across the bed.
Tulips are grown in the greenhouse, using pre chilled bulbs, and in the field as well. In the field, they are grown in two sets to space out the crop: one in full sun, the other under shade. Beds are tilled and the bulbs are pushed in by hand (instead of trenching) to about 2 1/2 inches deep, and a layer of sawdust is added to the top. The entire plant, bulb and all, is pulled when harvesting. Bulbs that don’t bloom, for whatever reason, are removed to eliminate disease carryover.

Next stop was Blue Magic Growers, which produces 500,000 lilies per year. They produce flowers in five moving greenhouses and have about 15 acres in field production. Moving greenhouses! These greenhouses were full-sized, glass greenhouses – roughly 30 feet wide and maybe 60 or 80 feet long. They were moved on a track system of metal rails, and could be moved over four different growing areas. The plumbing and electricity were set up so they could unplug the houses and plug them back in at the next spot. The houses are enormously heavy, and they move them with tractors or large winches. Their newest moveable greenhouse is a state-of-the-art structure with, lights, heat, and ventilation systems, and cost $250,000! (That’s right, a quarter million – 2.5 embryos at the dude ranch.) They still water by hand. The moveable greenhouses are moved four times a year – the beds are planted, the house is moved along tracks to cover the new crop until harvest, and then is moved on to the next crop. One of the crops they cover with the big house is viburnum, which is covered to get earlier flowers. They were in permanent beds, and the plants were perfect, but try as we might, we couldn’t see how such a crop could pay for a greenhouse this expensive.

On to Smit Nursery, Abbotsford, B.C. The Smit brothers started their operation in 1986, having bought a daffodil farm. They put up moveable greenhouses, and within a year or two had moved into perennial production. They grow forced cut flower perennials like peonies, delphinium, astilbe and solidago, and also sell perennial divisions. They move their glass greenhouses to force early blooms on perennial crops. At all these operations, we saw equipment and machinery that we all wanted to know about. We asked Gerard Smit where he gets these things. “Oh, that’s from Holland,” he said. Everywhere we went, that was the answer – ”Oh, that’s from Holland.”
The perennials are lifted and divided every year or two. Gerard says they get a lot more divisions than they need, but they divide and sell what they can, and store what they need to replant the crop. The perennial divisions are held in trays and put in coolers at just below freezing, keeping them disease free until sale or planting.
Gerard showed us something of the process of preparing the site for one of his greenhouses. He has only a half-inch of topsoil with clay underneath, so when preparing a greenhouse site, all of the soil material is dug out, drains are put in, soil is brought back in and leveled. There is underground irrigation installed, micro emitters on 1.5- or 2-inch PVC; fertilizers can be applied via the irrigation system.

Final stop on the tour was at Ravenek Greenhouses, and John Ravenek showed off some of their production areas, including their trials greenhouse. (Look for the new ‘Guardian’ series of delphinium. It looked great here!). Snapdragons have been a major crop and they are adding lights to maximize production year-round. Snaps are planted close, like the lisianthus at Xenios. Excessive humidity is a major problem in these glass greenhouses in winter, and Ravenek was experimenting with an innovative system of small inflated plastic tubes, about 4 inches wide, that blew air in among the plants to increase circulation and decrease humidity. They had about 6 tubes in a 4-foot wide bed, and each tube had tiny perforations that blew air. Sulfur evaporator pots provide mildew control. These pots use elemental sulfur, heated up by a light bulb. They come on with a timer, and the sulfur is evaporated and spreads through the house. (One grower told us that sulfur cannot be burned in poly houses; he said that the sulfur breaks down the plastic).
Greenhouse snaps can grow up to 5 feet tall, and the plants at Ravenek’s were beautiful. The plants are not pinched. The snaps are harvested by pulling up the whole plant, and beds are then steamed and replanted . Lisianthus will take the place of snaps in the summer production, when snaps are planted in the field. Crop time on snaps ranges from 9 weeks in summer to 24 weeks in the winter. The schedule is unrelenting because John is trying to provide a steady supply of flowers to market.
The planting beds in the Ravenek greenhouses have tracks that run down the sides of each bed. They are able to use these tracks to trolley a picking cart in the aisles, and for a cool new aluminum transplanting cart that runs over the bed. Two people put down the plugs ahead of the cart, and two people lie belly-down on the transplanter and plant. The cart coasts along smoothly with a push of the foot. “Oh, it’s from Holland,” they said.

Now about that auction. Like we said, they have it all wrong. First of all there is no auctioneer yelling at 500 miles a minute. It’s dead quiet. Then these folks start high and work low! Can’t sell any $250,000 embryos that way. And most amazingly, this is a growers’ cooperative! Here in Texas trying to get growers to cooperate is like keeping frogs in a wheelbarrow, but these guys all get along, at least on the surface!
As we said, the United Flowers Growers auction is a Dutch-style auction. There have been other Dutch auctions in North America that have tried to get started, with only a limited amount of success. But this auction is doing well. The UFG auction has been running for 40 years. Growers from the Fraser River Valley area of B.C. sell bedding plants, potted plants and cut flowers through the auction. The auction runs Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, shippers can arrive any time (‘24/7’). A typical grower brings 4-10 carts per shipment. Each cart has about 16 buckets of flowers. These carts are leased by the growers who are provided with a lock for each cart, and locks are kept by the growers and transferred onto the carts they deliver. The locks keep track of the carts, and if they lose a lock, they essentially lose a cart. Buckets are all uniform and provided by the auction (with a deposit), flowers are all sleeved; tops of some of the buckets are outfitted with a plastic frog that keeps the flowers upright in the bucket. Growers enter their invoices into the computer on arrival and a copy of the shipment travels with the cart as it moves into position on an automated track that carries carts into the auction arena. The carts are all numbered, and after the items are bought, they are distributed to the buyers’ carts. To be first or last in the auction is undesirable, so every morning there is a lottery that decides the lineup. Over 80,000 carts go through the auction every year!
The arena is quite a sight. The buyer’s seats go up steeply, like an Imax theater. The floor is like a stage, where the carts of flowers circle out on stage at one end and back in on the other. Above the flowers, where a screen would be, are four large “clocks” – lighted dials that spin backward as the price of a cart of flowers goes down. The buyers, who range from retail florists to wholesalers to mass marketers, compete with each other in a game of chicken to see how low they can let a price go before they bid on something they want. The idea is that if you want a particularly choice group of flowers, you need to bid on it high before the price goes down and someone else bids on it.
All the bidding is electronic. The buyers have little buttons they push when they want to bid. To complicate matters, the four bidding clocks run simultaneously, so you really have to be sharp to follow what is being bid for on each clock. The buyer has different buttons for each clock. If a buyer hits the wrong button, he might end up with a whole cart full of something he doesn’t need!
Prices for the flowers are decided in a couple of ways. A grower can state a minimum price, which will stop the clock if that price is not met. The auction starts high and goes lower. It wasn’t exactly clear who sets the high price. There is a minimum price set by the auction house at 12 cents a stem for a greenhouse cut flower, no matter what type. If it doesn’t sell at that price, the grower gets charged 7% on that product and the auction house will throw it in the dumpster. But very little product gets dumped except maybe in the height of summer.
Buyers can guess at how low they can go for a flower by guessing at the amount of supply because the product is moving through right in front of them. The process is completely silent. Things move fast! In Holland, only sample carts are sent out, so buyers cannot speculate on getting a lower price because they don’t know how many flowers are actually available.
Grower members have a set of standards that they, through “grower commodity groups,” and the auction, have devised. Flowers are bunched usually in 10 stem bunches, sometimes in 5, banded with a rubber band or elastic tie, and placed in a sleeve. Growers grade their own products, Premium, #1, #2, #3; most growers ship #1 stems. They try to keep all the product about the same grade so as to level out the prices they receive. If product comes into the auction house that is unsaleable with brown leaves, insect damage, etc., it will go straight into the garbage. Because growers rely so heavily on the auction as their primary market, they growers keep the standards high so as to keep prices high. United Flower Growers sells locally grown product first, and only imports varieties that are not locally available, such as tropicals.
Wholesale buyers come from Vancouver and the surrounding cities, and farther away locations such as Seattle and Calgary, to purchase product for redistribution. Every buyer is pre approved before being allowed into the auction. Payments to growers are made electronically. 30% of the buyers purchase 70% of the product.
It is an incredible system, and it is made possible by the cooperation of the growers. Over 200 growers are members of UFG.
Here in Texas we have a long way to go before we have enough growers for this type of auction. But even then, it would be a hard sell. Folks here just aren’t used to buying and selling flowers “On the Hoof”!