<Begin Segment 17>

VY: What was it like for you to be a woman in this industry?

FN: Well, I used to go to growers' meetings and be the only woman there. But everybody was very kind to me. [Laughs] But I felt that I had to go to growers' meetings because I have to support my industry. So no matter what, I would show up. You know, a person like Shimi Shibata, he wanted you to always have the information. And so whenever there would be a trip to a foreign country, he says, "Flora, you go, and he encouraged me to go." And then we saw this competition coming from Central and South America, and he organized, he knew that he couldn't take a large group of people, so he only had his growers that were with him go on these trips, and I went on every single one of those trips with them. We would be a small group, like five or six people, and we would all go together. And so that's when I first went to South America with Shimi, and I was the only woman there. But I do speak a little bit of Spanish since most of our employees are Mexican. And so Shimi wanted me to be there, because he knew that I could communicate with our fellow growers in other countries like that. So he wanted me to be there.

VY: What part of South America did you go to?

FN: We made a trip to Colombia, we made a trip to Ecuador, made another trip to Colombia, two trips to Colombia and went to Ecuador.

VY: So there was competition coming from those areas in the cut flower business?

FN: Right. And these farms that we saw in South America, they were very, very large, much larger than the farms that we had here. We could see the numbers growing, and the USDA, the Department of Agriculture, started publishing every week the quantities that were coming in, and we could see that the numbers were going up very rapidly. Because in the South American countries, they really thought that growing cut flowers and sending them to the United States was a really viable thing to develop their economy, and so they were well supported by the government. And our government, for some reason, was behind supporting these South American countries because they felt that if they could help the economies develop in South America, that this would help curtail part of this problem that the United States was having with the drug industry. They thought that if flower growing could be developed and encouraged, that drugs would be less of a problem. And so they encouraged the governments of South America to encourage their people, and what the governments of South America did was they, I feel, subsidized shipping of the air shipping into the United States, and I think that the United States government did not increase or pursue tariffs, and we could not compete. And my brother told me that when, in a product, if you get twenty-five percent of the market coming in from a foreign country, you've lost control of the price you could charge for your product. And so this happened first to the carnation business. Colombia was the leading country of sending carnations to the United States, and carnations were very well suited to growing in Colombia, so they took over the market, and we had the flower growers that were growing carnations in California, they started quickly switching over to roses. And then in Ecuador, Ecuador was a warmer country, so they were growing roses there, and that rapidly increased. And so California could no longer compete, and we could not send our flowers to, back east and compete. And so then we started to try to sell in the state of California and more locally, but there were just too many growers, absolutely too many square feet of greenhouses in California. So gradually the greenhouses came down, and then the South Americans really took over.

VY: So at this time, the industry, your industry, was already shipping cut flowers across the country, across the United States?

FN: That was our main market. Because we had become so large as far as the quantity of greenhouses we had in California. So what we did was we made it difficult for the local growers that were back east.

VY: Were you shipping out of the country at all?

FN: No, we were not shipping out of the country. It's very difficult to ship out of the United States to other countries.

VY: Why is that?

FN: Well, there's tariffs... I mean, where would we ship to? What country could take our flowers? I mean, we had vast amounts of production in California. So this took down a whole group of industries. It affected our suppliers, like the people we bought fertilizer from? It affected the plant hybridizers who would hybridize plants specifically for greenhouse growing. It would affect the people that grew plants for us. There were a lot of industries that lost... I don't know if you've ever heard of Jackson & Perkins, but that's a very old rose growing company. And they grew roses for gardens, but a big part of their industry was hybridizing for greenhouse growers. Well, that is all gone. In fact, the Jackson & Perkins, J&P, that hybridizing company, it exists, but it's not a California company anymore. It grows garden varieties, but it's nothing like what it used to be. And the hybridizer that grew the new varieties for greenhouse varieties, he has no job. It's closed, that part of the business is closed. So with the loss of our nursery business, cut flowers, there are very few cut flowers left in the state of California. There is an industry, mostly in the South, but it's nothing compared to what it used to be when we were a big shipping state to ship out of.

VY: Where do most cut flowers come from today?

FN: Well, like I said, we do have an industry in California still, but it's very small compared to what it used to... most of our flowers come from Central and South America.

VY: Did the U.S. government ever offer any support to the local growers?

FN: No, they were always supporting imported flowers. They were not supporting, we did not have support from the United States government. And you know, the rules that we had to follow for our (employees), for anything that we used to put on the plants, like insecticides or anything, fungicides, we all had to follow the rules of the state of California in the United States. But you know, the flowers that are coming in from foreign countries, we have no idea what they're using, we have no idea how they're growing the plants, but that's the way it is now. We can't exist with the rules that the government has. And also, even within the (potted) plant business, in any form of agriculture in California is becoming increasingly difficult to find workers. Workers are not going into agriculture, so more and more, everything will have to be mechanized.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.