In the village (village) Betania Colombian María Rosmery Martínez’s “illusions” have been blooming since 2019, when she quit her job as a butler to start a hydrangea crop that she turned into a thriving agribusiness that it has successfully exported to the United States and Korea.
While sporting good-sized blooms and pretty leaves, Floriculture is proud of the 900 stems shipped the day before to Miami.
“I’m happy because I’m going to leave a legacy to my three boys (children),” Rosmery, who learned the trade and managed to run his company Los Cacahuates SAS, located in the municipality of Carmen de Viboral, told EFE. .
In this population of the department of Antioquia (northwest) hundreds of hydrangeas appear on every street corner, the scientific name of hydrangeas which, for their quality and beauty, are appreciated in international markets.
PAY FOR YOUR DREAMS
This path that began full of doubts almost five years ago, at the suggestion of a relative and in the company of her husband, Antonio Vásquez, was built on a “land” with which they were able to collect the money which they earned as guards of farms in different parts of the country.
With the business in motion, the roles were shared: “Don Toño”, as he is known in his village, is in charge of fumigating, fertilizing, pruning and weeding with the workers, while Rosmery receives the flowers after cutting to fix them, make them up, style them and moisturize them with two young collaborators.
“We got tired of being stewards, something we’ve worked on all our lives, and we started growing hydrangeas. They started selling and I got it into my head to become a marketer. We struggled for about two years to start exporting until we had a customer in Korea, then another in the United States,” says the entrepreneur.
Although they initially manipulated the harvest empirically and intuitively, the flowers turned out well. Even the rain and hail have been kind, as have the plagues. And in the beauty of its product, the good hand of women was seen, due to the joy that comes from living with the hydrangea, “a flower that I have loved all my life”.
Exploring this world, he learned about the production, marketing and export of flowers through his cultivation, which has some 27,000 plants, produces some 3,000 stems a week and employs four people, including migrants and a young man. hard of hearing. .
YOUR ENTREPRENEURSHIP FLOURISHES
Her admission in 2022 to the Agribusiness Acceleration Base Method (MBA), a program of the Interactuar Corporation, marked a before and after in agribusiness to establish herself as a woman leader in the field by starting to interact with d other hydrangea growers and to visit flower exporters to learn about the details of the operation and learn about costs, suppliers and customers.
“They helped me a lot there. Without this study, I wouldn’t have made so much progress,” says the agro-entrepreneur.
Rosmery, who hopes to increase the capacity of his agribusiness to around 5,000 stems per week to meet the market, hopes that Los Cacahuates hydrangeas will continue to establish themselves overseas, as he has heard that in the United States “ when people go to the market, the first thing you buy is a bouquet of flowers”.
Even if one of her biggest dreams is to have a solid salesperson to feel “fulfilled”, this farmer is looking for a real impact: “What I want most is to generate more jobs because around here (in his village) there are a lot of people who need it”.
Interactuar’s agribusiness leader, Liliana Tabares, explains that in 2022 this company reached 170 agribusinesses with the MBA agro program, 36% of them women.
In the case of Rosmery, the growth in sales of Los Cacahuates stood out by 76% between 2021 and 2022, and the implementation in the culture of environmentally friendly practices with actions to save water, save energy and protect the soil with organic fertilizers.