Holiday tree harvest under way

At Drake's Crossing Christmas Tree Farm near Silver Falls State Park, helicopters haul trees between hilly slopes and a private road. Workers bale the trees, tag them for size and load them on trucks for shipping.

Part-owner Barbara Hupp said the harvest is halfway done at her 500-acre wholesale farm. The harvest for Hupp and other East Valley growers will peak around Thanksgiving.
While it's too early to tell how this season's harvest will turn out, it's likely to be significantly lower than recent years.

Hupp said the farm harvested 25,000 trees last year, down from 45,000 in boom years.

Hupp and other Christmas tree growers face a relatively straightforward economic problem: too many trees.

There are so many more trees reaching maturity this year than customers ready to buy them, that the oversupply will bring about "the largest shift in the history of the industry," according to Bryan Ostlund, executive director of the Pacific Northwest Christmas Trees Association.

The peak of planting for Oregon's Christmas trees was in 2001 to 2002. Those trees are now maturing, leading to the current oversupply, Ostlund said.

"When you're 2 1/2 million trees short, that's enormous," Ostlund said. "As an industry we need to be talking about what that means."

As a result, the average price per tree in Marion County is dipping, from $15.60 in 2005 to $14.95 in 2008, according the most recent figures from the National Agricultural Statistics Service.

Sales are down this year at Drake's Crossing, a little more than last year, Hupp said. Last year was already a hard year.

"It isn't a grower's market," Hupp said.

The harvest season will last about a month this year, which is "pretty normal," she said.

It can take seven to 12 years to grow a 6-foot tree, depending on the species. When the economy started to sour, some trees were already halfway through their growth cycle. But for Hupp, that's just the way farming can be — a gamble.

"People planted wheat two years ago because it was such a good price. Everyone planted to get in on the price and then it dropped," Hupp said. "It takes eight to 10 years to find out what doesn't have a market."