Under a clear blue sky, just a few miles from Santa, Idaho, a lone worker carefully cuts small, marked trees. The trees will be sold in a couple of days by Hash Tree Co. of Princeton, Idaho - one of 200 or so Idaho Christmas tree growers.
Hash's "native" trees, thinned from Idaho forests to give bigger trees room to grow, are only a tiny part of the firm's total production. For Hash and most other Christmas tree producers, native trees are just a snowflake in a blizzard of plantation trees.But they may have put a chill on sales of live Christmas trees. Some growers are convinced that more and more consumers have switched to artificial trees, in part because of environmental concerns.
According to the National Christmas Tree Association in Milwaukee, Wis., more than half of the 72 million Christmas trees displayed in American homes aren't the real McCoy.
"A lot of people think that we're pilfering the forest," said Dave Hash, owner of Hash Tree Co.
That's a misconception, says Danny Barney, superintendent of the University of Idaho's Sand-point Research and Extension Center. He says some people believe that all live trees are "ripped from the woods."
"They don't know that Christmas trees are grown on farms like wheat or cotton or any other crop."
Competition from artificial trees is one of the top problems faced by Christmas tree growers. Another is oversupply.
"There are a lot of trees out there at this time," said David Jenkins, president of the Inland Empire Christmas Tree Association. "It is tight. Prices are down a bit to the grower.
"But most of the trees in our area are being sold," he added.
Nearly 36 million Christmas trees are grown in the United States. Hash estimates that only about 150,000 - valued at about $2.5 million - come from Idaho growers.
But producers say what Idaho trees lack in quantity they make up in quality.
Idaho-grown trees can take freezing weather without losing needles like less hardy coastal trees, they say. And, although Oregon, Michigan and Wisconsin trees sparkle in far more homes over the holidays than do Idaho trees, Idaho trees reach the high end of the market.
"West of the Cascades they grow tens of thousands of Christmas trees, as far as you can see," Barney said. Most of them are Douglas fir.
"We can't grow Douglas fir here so we've concentrated on Scotch Pine, Grand Fir and Concolor Fir," Barney said.
Hash describes the Idaho Grand Fir as highly sought after in the industry because Idaho's deep loam soils give the tree better shape, form and durability.
"But it takes us one to three years longer to produce a marketable tree than the rest of the Northwest," he said, "and Inland trees sell for more."
The bulk of Idaho's trees are grown in the northern counties and shipped to neighboring Rocky Moun-tain states, some as far north as Alaska. But most Idaho growers produce smaller numbers of Christ-mas trees sold locally, often as choose-and-cut operations.
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Dena Olsen writes for the University of Idaho College of Agriculture.