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A Tasmanian flower producer wants country of origin labelling on imported blooms, which account for about half of the Australian market. Australian flower growers struggling to compete with cheap imports have been calling for change for years. Pip Sadler, who with her brother Rob Sadler runs an extensive flower operation at Flowerdale in north-west Tasmania, said if food was required to have a label indicating where it was grown, so should fresh flowers. "Who's picked the product? How old is that person? What were they paid? And how have the flowers been chemically treated, let alone the thousands of air miles imported flowers rack up," she said. Ms Sadler said mandatory labelling would allow Australian customers to choose where their money went, and what sort of labour standards, environmental impact and carbon footprint they were prepared to accept. Buying local over imported Ms Sadler said many Australians had unknowingly bought foreign blooms. Her Brisbane-based sister, Bec Thomas, quit her corporate job to become an advocate for their flowers and the Australian industry. "I'm trying to increase awareness and educate and just make people think at the point of purchase, 'I wonder who grew these flowers for me?'" Ms Thomas said. Ms Thomas opened a flower shop in the Brisbane suburb of Toowong three years ago. Her siblings send shipments of flowers to Brisbane several times a week. "They're picked, they're cooled and packed … then put on the boat overnight, and a cool truck meets the boat the next morning and then zooms up the coast [to Brisbane] and then I grab the flowers, and bring them to market," Ms Thomas said. Starting a conversation Ms Thomas said every sale was an opportunity to educate customers about the impact flower imports had on Australian flower farmers, particularly rose growers. "Some of these growers actually went under … as there's a lot of imported roses that come all the way from Colombia, Ecuador, Kenya, you know, 12,000 kilometres away," she said. Ms Thomas said customers could be confident farm staff had been paid properly and the environment was not harmed if they bought Australian flowers. She said her flowers were not as cheap as imported blooms but they lasted longer. Family-run flower operation Her brother and sister have survived the onslaught of cheap imports by investing millions of dollars in a high-tech glasshouse from the Netherlands. The 2-hectare facility protects their crop against wind, rain and hail. "Everything is climate controlled, all the fans, the air exchange, everything is done by an algorithm," Mr Sadler said. "It will predict what the weather is going to do. It will work it all out. It's very clever. The glasshouse holds 800,000 lily bulbs at various stages of growth. Picking and bulb planting is done every week. Four million lily stems are harvested every year along with thousands of tulips, snapdragons, stocks, statice, sweet william and delphiniums. Mr Sandler said imports had caused a drop in the number of lily producers in Australia. He and Ms Sadler were happy to divert a fraction of their blooms to their sister in Brisbane if it meant more consumers started asking whether the fresh flowers they were about to buy were flown or grown. Watch ABC TV's Landline at 12:30pm AEST on Sunday or stream anytime on ABC iview.
