Christmas Tree Growers Fighting For Sales
Christmas Tree Growers Fighting For Sales
Beleaguered Christmas Tree Farmers have just kicked off their sales season last weekend. They said it’s not such a wonderful life.There are total 250 Christmas Tree Farms and Christmas Tree growers in California. U.S. Department of Census have said that their sales have declined to almost 44 percent as compared to last year. Mostly Christmas Tree growers say that their sales are coming down and they cannot compete because of the artificial tree trade which spends millions of dollars ever year just to promote their products.
If that’s not bad enough, farmers believe that conservatives and the White House are using their livelihood to play political games. This month, pressure from Republicans led the Obama administration to suspend a Christmas tree research and promotion program just 24 hours after it was approved.but United States Department of Administration USDA has delayed the implementation so that the stake-holders can understand the program well and adopt it easily.
These Christmas Tree growers have asked the governemnt to give funding to them to support their sales. The revised tax will be now 15 cents from every tree sold that makes an estimated two million dollars every year for USDA. Government has exempted the farmers who grow less than 500 trees.
“We’ve been working on this for 3 1/2 years,” said Betty Malone, an Oregon tree farmer and one of the leaders pushing the Christmas Tree Promotion, Research and Information Order. “It seems that a couple of people are willing to sell our industry down the river for an Obama gotcha. To be penalized for using a tool that’s been available to us and other farmers for decades is crazy.”
Government has reserved this amount of two million dollars for research and development of this industry.
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