News » 21.10.2026 - CAN: How two generations have kept this family flower farm in bloom

Rosa Flora didn't become one of Canada's largest cut-flower producers by doing what's easy. In an industry under pressure from rising labour and energy costs, low-priced international competitors and now 50-per-cent tariffs on Canadian flower exports to the United States, the two-generation family operation in Southern Ontario sees its ability to adapt and to grow demanding products as central to its future.

The company in Dunnville, 60 kilometres south of Hamilton, employs about 200 people and produces millions of stems annually for floral wholesalers across North America. With 60 per cent to 70 per cent of Rosa Flora's flowers shipped to the U.S., a substantial portion of its enterprise is exposed in the trade war.

"It's the hard products that maybe somebody else has a difficult time growing and shipping that we actually excel at," says Ralph DeBoer, 54, who with his wife Arielle DeBoer, 49, owns the 55-acre business. Ms. DeBoer's parents Otto and Corine Bulk started Rosa Flora in 1978 with a single greenhouse of hybrid tea roses after immigrating to Canada from Aalsmeer, a Dutch flower-growing town where Mr. Bulk's family had run nurseries.

"But we could only sell so many roses" from Ontario, Mr. Bulk says. As lower-cost producers in countries such as Colombia and Ecuador transformed the global market, Rosa Flora expanded into other crops including gerbera, snapdragons and lisianthus.
 

Source: www.floraldaily.com

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