Attempting to Sell Through Group Buying
“My grandfather was one of the founders of the agricultural village of Zippori, in the Western Galilee. In the seventies, my father set up the flower farm there. We are a seasonal farm, and most of our produce is exported abroad. The crisis caught us right in the middle of our peak season of February-March, with 40 employees, mostly foreign workers, harvesting Anemones and colourful Calla Lilies and exporting them. And then, one day, we discovered that all the flowers we had sent to the Netherlands had ‘hit zero’, meaning that nobody was interested in buying them. You grow, harvest, sort, send and pay for transportation and unloading – only to discover in the end that you also need to pay for someone to take the flowers that you sent and throw them in the garbage. It was a real blow, not just a scratch to the paintwork.
“The first thing I did was to bring all the foreign workers to fruit and vegetable farms, where there was thinning and harvesting to be done and a perennial shortage of workers. I’m considered a salaried employee on sick leave, because I was severely injured at work, so today my father does everything. There is no alternative, because there is no demand in Israel or abroad. You’re standing out in the field, surrounded by vast quantities of flowers and asking yourself – what’s the point? It’s cheaper for us to close.
“At some point, we began to advertise those flowers that we had kept refrigerated for direct sales over Facebook, but were only able to sell a small amount. We packed up and closed down. The assessor we brought in estimated the losses at hundreds of thousands of shekels. We are supposed to begin planting for the next season in four months’ time, so we are hoping to have a clearer picture by then. In the meantime, we are running a social media sales campaign ahead of Shavuot for domestic cotton plants. We have been left with a huge supply because our Dutch client cancelled our contract as soon as the crisis began. We are marketing it through buying groups that are promoting it, and I hope we will succeed, so that we at least have some kind of revenue stream.”