Peter Ullrich, the founder of one of the biggest flower farms in the world, Esmeralda Farms, died last night in his residence in Miami. He became 74 years old.
Born in Bad Wildungen, Germany in 1942, Ullrich moved to the United States in 1962. He was one of the first growers to establish a presence in Latin America, and foresee the possibilities of its favorable climate in which he could grow flowers on a year-round basis. He has been growing, importing and marketing flowers for over 30 years.
In the late 60’s, along with two other part time jobs, Ullrich began to make extra money as a flower peddler. Twice a week Ullrich would drive his tiny MGB to the airport and load up the little car with two or three boxes of flowers and sell them from store to store. He became so successful at this, that he dropped his other work and focused all of his energies on selling flowers full time.
As his clientele and his business acumen grew, Ullrich began to sense a great opportunity. Acting on that instinct he opened his own wholesale operation in 1971 in Queens, New York, importing flowers from South America. But as he soon learned, selling flowers wasn’t difficult. GETTING flowers was the problem.
Seeing the vast potential, Ullrich invested with two South American partners in a farm in Colombia. But, even his youthful enthusiasm couldn’t overcome the challenges presented by this fledgling farm thousands of miles away. After a year, his partners insisted that he buy them out. Nevermind the fact that Peter knew nothing about growing flowers… or that he didn’t speak a word of Spanish, he soon owned a farm in South America.
With dedication and lots of hard work, Ullrich turned that business around, selling his flowers through CFX, and shortly after that starting Condor Farms marketing arm in Miami, FL. He is by nature a perfectionist, and that quality led him to create some of the finest operations in the world. His greenhouses, which are kept super clean by industry standards, give you a sense of the man behind the business – a man who strives for excellence.
His success led him to expand in 1978 to Peru, where the climate was so perfect he could plant his chrysanthemums without the benefit of greenhouses, right next to the sugar cane fields; however, he soon learned that at the end of the growing season, farmers burn the sugar cane, which left him with a field full of soot-covered chrysanthemums that had to be plowed under and lost forever. Fortunately, Ullrich was one who learned from his lessons and plowed on undaunted.
When he found it difficult to get airlines to take his flowers from Colombia to the U.S., he simply bought a 707 from Lufthansa and started his own airline, a move that worked to his advantage years later when UPS bought his airline for the landing rights.
Ullrich was a revolutionary thinker, always looking for better practices or better products. As he told a group of colleagues in 2006: „I look at our business like the hi-tech business. If we don’t improve what we have, if we continue to sell what we have, we cannot expect that our business is going to grow!” In the early 1990’s, Ullrich began experimenting with breeding. Now, at any given moment, he may have 25,000 different seedlings of which two might perhaps produce a new product that is good enough to actually market.
Ullrich was among the first South American importers in the industry and today his organization remains one of the most prominent and well-respected players on the international floral scene. Today, Esmeralda Farms employs over 5,000 people, with farms spanning over 1,000 acres… an amazing end result that began as a part-time job in a tiny automobile.
In 2008 Ullrich received the 2008 Leland T. Kintzele (LTK) Distinguished Service Award during the WF&FSA Convention on March 6, 2008 in Tampa, The LTK award, the highest honor given by WF&FSA, annually recognizes a member who has made significant, long-term contributions to the floral industry and has displayed the qualities of integrity, fairness, perseverance and decisiveness during his or her career.
