January 9-12

It’s 8:30 am and the students are in class. It has been cooler and rainy here the last couple of days. This morning seemed brighter and warmer. It’s tough to know what the day is going be like. Let me back up one step and introduce you to Cristina. Cristina teaches the survival Portuguese and she also locates the host families and matches the students with the families for the home stay which is a key experience the students will remember for a very long time. We are now done with our survival Portuguese class and each student is creating their introduction for next week. They have the information to put together; they just need to think about what they want to say.

The last class with Cristina ended with her teaching us a Portuguese song and then the students learning a popular Brazilian dance which is much like the two step.

Prof. Fernando Peres started his lectures on Tuesday. He earned his PhD at Ohio State University in Agricultural Economics. His background is economics, sociology and business. His focus with us is on the history of Brazil as it relates to agriculture. He works from a timeline for the 1900’s.

On Wednesday we spent the day observing the flower industry of Brazil. In the morning we visited Veiling in Holambra. There is nothing like this in the United States. It is one of the largest flower auctions in the world. Since there are no big flower holidays coming up we saw a slow day but there were probably 20,000 flowers auctioned during our visit. The auction is what is called a “reverse auction” and to speed up the sale it starts from the highest bid rather than the lowest bid so it goes very fast. It is all automated and there are three clocks going at the same time. The clock shows the species, amount of flowers, seller, bid, next lot coming up etc. It is quite interesting to watch.

From there we went to Bioflora which is a seller of flowers to the auction. The focus of the company was on orchids. There were many beautiful orchids. The planting of seedlings to full grown plants is based on the holidays in the country. The orchids move from greenhouse to greenhouse based on the stage of growth. Orchids need a cooling stage in order to force the bloom. Gustav, who did the presentation, gave each student an orchid cutting. He talked about new species he was producing and the fact that they go to the Netherlands to see what they are doing to improve production in Brazil. Temperature in the greenhouse is extremely important for each stage of growth. We also saw a new package they were using for shipping orchids. After each visit we give the farmer or industry representative a gift.

We had a nice lunch in Holumbra and then went to Terra Viva which also sold flowers at Veiling but it was much larger and more automated than Bioflora. We observed the whole system from seedling to packaging and loading on the truck. Quite an investment. I believe it was about 28 acres under cover. We could compare the orchids at Bioflora to those of Terra Viva. The students can tell you the differences in the appearance of the orchids. We also saw chrysanthemums and anturios.

We got back to Antonio’s about 6:00 pm. We split up for supper and about half the group went out later in the evening. Everyone arrived at class this morning at 8:00am. Tomorrow we leave for our visit to the Sao Paulo metropolitan area.

Take care,
AZP Class 13