Christmas Trees 2018 Pt 2

Christmas Trees 2018 Pt 2

Bob Larson
Bob Larson
I'm Bob Larson. Christmas tree production is down this year, meaning we'll probably be paying a little more for our Nobles, Doug or Grand firs.

Oregon State University Christmas tree specialist Chal Landgren says that's due to a reduction in the number of northwest growers ...

LANDGREN ... "If we looked at how many growers we had perhaps five years ago or three years ago even, we've lost about a third of the growers because it's just been a really oversupplied market for a little while so growers weren't making money so they decided to grow something else or get out of the business. And so, the number of growers in Oregon is down to about mid-400s to 500 or so."

And, with the number of growers, He says, so goes the tree production ...

LANDGREN ... "Numbers of growers, acres produced has gone down a bit so we're going to probably settle somewhere around this 4-to-500 growers and somewhere in the 5-to-6-million trees per year. Looks like that's where we'll be for a while."

Landgren says that's off quite a bit from a decade ago when growers were producing millions more trees than now ...

LANDGREN ... "In the mid-2000s, we were up to almost 8-million trees. So, that many trees trying to find fewer markets dropped the price for everybody, so the supply and the number of growers went down. But, we have a few very large producers. There's probably three producers that each produce over a million trees, so those have stayed about the same."

Oregon is the number one state in the nation for Christmas tree production.

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