Business is blooming good

I am inside a climate-controlled poly-house, a sterile, artificial setting that leaves little room for romance. Inside, however, are rows and rows of rose bushes, that ultimate homage to love. They all stand perfectly still, as if frozen, each bush topped with plump buds. The buds are capped in tiny plastic nets, and reveal their colours where the green sepals part slightly.

We are in Dhruvahi Rose Farm, and Aravind Dhruva, the proprietor, explains that the flexible caps are put on the buds so that they retain their form until they are packed. “Like test-tube babies,” quips the photographer, rather inaccurately, but I can see what he means.

On the 20-acre farm in Dodda Tumkur village, about 37 km from Bengaluru, there are 10 such poly-houses that grow about 50 lakh roses each year.

I am at the farm just before Valentine’s Day, when the market for roses gets a huge boost. But incidentally, it’s not just February 14 that perks up the market but also the end of the ‘lean period’ in the Hindu calendar — mid-December to to mid-January — when no auspicious events like weddings or engagements take place. Demand peaks on Rose Day (February 7), which begins the countdown to Valentine’s Day. This year, the farm sold 8-10 lakh roses in the seven-day period from Rose Day to Valentine’s Day. The highest price a stem fetched was ₹18 this year, up from ₹10-₹12 last year.

Exacting standards

Before visiting Dhruva’s farm, I had imagined rose farms as green meadows filled with blushing rose bushes. But most roses sold in the market are grown in poly-houses in order to meet the exacting standards set by the export market and to increase their value in the domestic market.

Stem length, for instance, matters a great deal. The longer the stem the better for the life of the cut flower. Anything below 30 cm is considered zero length and fetches low prices while a 70-80-cm stem can fetch ₹15-₹16 a flower. Growers also look at how shiny the leaves are and the diameter of the bud — metrics that cannot be met if the roses are grown in fields.

Flowers are big business. According to Ramakrishna Karuturi, president, South Indian Floriculture Association, the floriculture industry does business in excess of ₹1,000 crore a year, including export and domestic sales.

The demand for roses is centred on Valentine’s Day, but Chinese New Year, International Women’s Day, Mother’s Day, Teacher’s Day and Friendship Day, as well as major festivals such as Diwali, Dussehra and Ganesh Chaturthi also see brisk sales. Even more important, as weddings get more lavish, the domestic market is increasing exponentially, with huge amounts of money spent on floral decorations and bouquets.

In 2016-17, India exported more than 22 tonnes of flowers, worth some ₹550 crore. And the major export destinations were the U.S., the U.K, U.A.E., Germany and the Netherlands. In the past 10 years, Kenya and Ethiopia have come up as major competitors in the cut flowers business, but growers here are expanding their base as well.

Buds capped in tiny plastic nets to retain their form, in Dhruvahi Rose Farm, Dodda Tumkur. | Photo Credit: Sudhakara Jain

For instance, Karuturi’s company, Karuturi Global Ltd., which is the world’s largest rose company with a 10% market share globally, has 3,000 sq. km of agricultural land in Ethiopia and 239 hectares of land for rose cultivation.

Taj Mahal, a ruby-red variety of rose, is the reigning favourite among buyers, both domestic and international. But others like Gold Strike (yellow), Awallence (white and peach) and Noblesse (pink) come close seconds.

The International Flower Auction Bangalore (IFAB) conducts auctions for flowers grown not just in Bengaluru but also in other floriculture hubs like Pune. Here, roses, carnations, gerberas, gladiolis and orchids vie for attention, with the gerbera being almost as popular as the rose. The Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA) calls floriculture a ‘sunrise industry’, which has taken “giant steps” in the export arena in the years since liberalisation.

Going by IFAB figures, the market is expanding steadily. Mithun, development manager at IFAB, cites the lack of cold-storage chains as one of the major reasons for floriculture not taking off as well as it could. A grower who has come all the way from Delhi to Bengaluru to auction his produce at IFAB agrees. The absence of an extensive cold storage network means not just flowers but all perishables have a short shelf-life, with growers spending more money just reaching produce to markets on time.

Delicate queen

At the farm, Dhruva is aware of the big picture but is worrying more about the everyday problems of growing roses.

As we sip coffee in his velvet-curtained drawing room, he talks of how much care the rose requires, living up to its reputation as the delicate queen of flowers.

Most roses sold in the market are grown in poly-houses like these in order to meet the exacting standards set by the export market. | Photo Credit: Sudhakara Jain

Water, obviously, is paramount — one bush requires a litre of water per day. But in the 30-35 km radius from the heart of Bengaluru, within which most of the rose farms are, the water table is going down due to extensive urbanisation. And as they dig deeper, reaching 1,000-1,500 sq. ft below the surface, the water is often heavy with sodium and chlorides, chemicals that are bad for roses and other flowers. “We use nitric acid to neutralise these chemicals,” says Dhruva.

Besides, the roses have to be fed, watered and sprayed with pesticides regularly to protect them from mites, thrips, powdery mildew, white flies and caterpillars. It’s a labour intensive business and for Dhruva, labour is the major problem. Most of the 80 workers on his farm are migrants from Assam. There is a 50% government subsidy on poly-houses, but that’s just a drop in the overall expensive input costs.

None of this seems to have discouraged Biju Purayil and his two friends Sahil Rao and Satyajit Gantayat, who quit comfortable software jobs to take up farming full-time and get “their hands dirty”. They set up Urban Harvest, which grows Dutch roses and organic vegetables on a farm in Denkanikottai, 35 km from Hosur. “The picture painted of rose-farming is glossier than it is in reality, but it does pay,” says Purayil.

For the V-Day flush, they start preparing from mid-December. After 45 days of intensive care, which begins with levelling the ground, enriching it with nutrients, planting the saplings, and moving on to bending the shoots, removing extra growth, and harvesting the buds when they reach the ‘pinhole’ stage (the bud should be tight enough to let just a pin through), the Taj Mahals are ready for lovers waiting to say it with roses. “This year’s market has been better than last year’s,” Purayil says.

In Dhruva’s farm, young women with nimble fingers are sorting stems according to height and colour, taking off the plastic caps, plucking off the leaves, and finally packing the flowers in bunches of 20. Chatting and giggling, they lighten up the dark room in which they work as much as the fresh roses do. I wonder if they will get roses on Valentine’s Day.

anusua.m@thehindu.co.in