Woodland Tulip Festival News

Bloomin' Bottoms

Bloomin' Bottoms - By Sally Ousley

The Daily News - Longview, WA
Apr 19, 2004 - 07:27:35 am PDT

WOODLAND -- Benno Dobbe, 53, remembers doing field work with horses on his father's farm in Holland. They pulled weeds and topped flowers by hand, spread straw over the bulbs as protection from the winter cold and shoveled the straw off the fields in the spring.

"When I was 15 years old, we got our first tractor," a 30-horsepower Massey-Ferguson with no cab, he said.

Rooted in such humble beginnings, Dobbe's dream of creating a bulb-and-cut flower business in the United States has evolved into multimillion dollar, Woodland-based enterprise that does business all over the world.

Holland America Bulb Farms Inc., owned by Dobbe and his wife, Klazina, is thriving while other bulb growers in Washington are in decline. The state had about 40 bulb growers in the 1940s, but now there are only seven, according to the Western Washington Horticultural Association.

Now in its 24th year, Dobbe's company does more than $20 million in business annually, he said. It employs 125 people full time and 100 seasonal workers, and has a $4 million payroll. It distributes between 30 million and 35 million bulbs and sells 5 million to 8 million cut flowers a year. The Woodland farm off Pekin Road, originally 50 acres, has expanded to 175 acres.

The Dobbes' family-owned enterprises includes the Woodland farm, a cut-flower business in California, a bulb export company in the Netherlands and the Royal Dutch Flower Gardens at the Woodland farm, which sells flowers, bulbs and specialty gifts.

"It's a challenge every day and every hour. We take pride in it," Dobbe said in an interview last week. "It's better to be very humble and stay humble because something can change.

"Success doesn't come easy. It's a combination of dreams and vision and hard work."

The success of the Dobbes' farm gave birth last year to the Woodland Tulip Festival, which they estimate brought 4,000 people to the farm to see the brilliant rows of tulips and other bulbs. This year the family expanded the festival to three weekends, with the last one coming up Saturday and Sunday.

"It's breathtaking every year," Klazina Dobbe said.

Although Dobbe had graduated from horticulture school when he was 16 and then had his own farm in the Netherlands, he saw an opportunity in the United States to develop a market for bulbs and cut flowers.

With a small amount of cash from the family farm in the Netherlands, the Dobbes and their three children came to the United States, put a down payment on five acres and leased 45 acres in Woodland in 1980.

"The United States is a unique country," Dobbe said. "It has lots of opportunity. I was hoping we could establish ourselves with a farm in Woodland and bring some beauty with the flowers we grow."

Klazina Dobbe, 51, said they had two plans.

"If the farm didn't work, then I'd become a waitress and Benno could be whatever."

The Dobbes didn't know a soul in Southwest Washington and didn't know what to expect.

"We started from scratch," Benno said.

Everyone in the family worked in the fields. Benno sold Christmas trees and bear grass, picked Scotch broom and sold flowers to make ends meet. With a bank loan, Dobbe imported tulip bulbs from the Netherlands and slowly added warehouse storage.

"We never forgot the Netherlands," Dobbe said.

Woodland turned out to be the ideal place for his farm. Dobbe said the sandy loam soil near the Lewis River and the climate are perfect combinations. He said he wanted his bulbs to bloom before the majority of the bulb growers in the Skagit Valley in Northwest Washington.

"A week or 10 days makes a difference," he said. "If you're the earliest, you set the pace for the market."

Dobbe said he courted area supermarkets for business.

"Supermarkets have been a good friend to our industry and to the customers," he said. "Now customers expect every supermarket to carry flowers."

As the Woodland farm prospered in the mid-1980s, Dobbe founded a new company in 1986 with a 280-acre farm in Nipomo, Calif., to grow cut flowers. He brought his brother over from The Netherlands as general manager and junior partner.

Trucks with refrigerated trailers haul Holland America flowers to Miami, Chicago and New York that are then distributed along the East Coast. Dobbe said he can track each truck on a computer to make sure the trailer stays at a cool 33 degrees.

"What I tell Benno now is that we're building a legacy," Klazina said. "In 20 years, this is going to be like a piece of Holland here."

If you go

What: Woodland Tulip Festival

Where: Holland America Bulb Farm, 1066 South Pekin Road, Woodland

When: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday and Sunday

How to get there: Take Davidson Avenue to Fifth Street, turn left, Fifth Street turns into South Pekin Road that goes past the Hulda Klager Lilac Gardens and continue on South Pekin.

Guided tours of tulip fields, display garden, handmade crafts, ethnic foods, music, dancing and children's activities. Retail shop, Royal Dutch Flower Gardens, also will be open.

For more information, call (360) 225-4512, or check www.lewisriver.com/woodland/tulips.

Tulipmania

Benno and Klazina Dobbe have made tulips popular in Woodland, but the enthusiasm is nothing compared with the tulip craze called "Tulipmania" that swept across Northern Europe nearly four centuries ago. When Conrad Guestner brought the first tulip bulbs from Turkey to Holland and Germany in 1559, the bulbs quickly became a status symbol for the wealthy because they were beautiful and hard to come by. By 1634, the rage for owning tulips had spread to the middle classes of Dutch society. At the height of tulipmania in 1635, a single tulip bulb was sold for the following items: four tons of wheat, eight tons of rye, one bed, four oxen, eight pigs, 12 sheep, one suit of clothes, two casks of wine, four tons of beer, two tons of butter, 1,000 pounds of cheese and one silver drinking cup. The modern-day value of all these is nearly $35,000. People were selling everything they owned, including homes and livestock, for the privilege of owning tulips. Prices ranged from $17,000 to $76,000 for a single bulb. By 1636, tulips were established on the Amsterdam stock exchange. The bottom fell out of the market in 1637, when a gathering of bulb merchants could not get the usual inflated prices. Word spread quickly, and thousands of Dutch businessmen were ruined in less than two months' time.

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