Text and the Flowers

If you happen to pass by Dimasalang Street in Manila and marvel at the cutflower market there teeming with the widest varieties of bromeliads, roses, mums and other blooms, chances are they’ve just been freshly delivered, thanks to "texting".

Cutflower entrepreneurs in La Trinidad, Benguet have been using sms or short messaging system–better known as texting–for some time now to communicate with flower dealers in the Dangwa bagsakan center in Dimasalang Street, Manila.

Dealers send text messages to the rose-growers in Barangay Alapang and rose-capital Bahung if there is a high demand for cutflowers in Dimasalang. This alerts the growers to cut their blooms and ship them out of Baguio for delivery the following day.

"This kind of direct order helps us cut down on losses," says Vicente Segundo, a Barangay Alapang councilor and a rose-grower himself.

Segundo says that ever since cellphone signals reached this area of La Trinidad, rose growers and vegetable farmers have turned to texting to communicate.

"It’s a lot cheaper, aside from the fact that you get your message across quickly," says Mercedes Chiuk, another rose grower, in her Kankana-ey dialect.

Smart is the only wireless communications provider that has put up gsm cellsites in La Trinidad, home of the fresh sweet strawberries, giant red tomatoes, bright green lettuce and now red, red roses.

Though landlines are already available in some of the areas in La Trinidad, majority of rose growers use text messaging to deal with buyers in Manila. For farmers like Segundo and Chiuk, texting, at P1 per send, is still the cheapest way to communicate.

Rose-grower Chiuk illustrates the use of text messages for their business. Dealers in Manila advise them days ahead, through text, of the impending demand for flowers, say for Valentine’s Day, graduation, or All Soul’s Day. Rose-growers then cut the required amount of blooms and keep them in storage coolers that can accommodate up to a hundred styropor containers, each containing a hundred dozen roses. By the time the demand day kicks in, a large supply of cutflowers can be sent to Manila for distribution.

"On days when we’ve already cut the flowers and the dealers in Manila send a text that either say prices for cutflowers are low or there’s no demand, we store them in the coolers and wait until the prices have slightly risen," explains Chiuk.

Not all flower-growers in northern Benguet, though, use text for business. In Burguias, where farmers grow shasta daisies and calla lilies, two-way radios and sometimes analog phones are still being used.

Radios are what rose-growers in La Trinidad used in the early 80’s when cellphones and fixed lines were not yet widely accessible.

The cutflower industry in the Cordilleras is considered one of the country’s sunrise industries. Although people have been into flower growing in Benguet, it was only in the ’80s that entrepreneurs began to see its huge business potential.

Barangay Bahung,which now prides itself for its numerous cutflower greenhouses, nurseries and plantations, used to have golden rice fields. But since water supply for planting rice was not enough, the people shifted to gardening. Roses were the first flowers grown in the area.

Now, popular blooms such as statice, anthurium, baby’s breath, gladiola, dahlias and mums are being propagated. Mums, in particular, are getting increased attention from farmers because of its high returns.

According to records of the Department of Agriculture, the Cordillera region is the major producer of roses, anthuriums, chrysanthemums and gladioli and is the second top producer of baby’s breath in the country.

So next time you receive a beautiful bunch of flowers, remember that texting helped make it happen.