{"id":13948,"date":"2017-12-10T14:23:00","date_gmt":"2017-12-10T22:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/associatednews.info\/content\/this-years-christmas-tree-shortage-has-roots-in-the-recession\/"},"modified":"2017-12-10T14:23:00","modified_gmt":"2017-12-10T22:23:00","slug":"this-years-christmas-tree-shortage-has-roots-in-the-recession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/associatednews.info\/content\/this-years-christmas-tree-shortage-has-roots-in-the-recession\/","title":{"rendered":"This Year's Christmas Tree Shortage Has Roots In The Recession"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Emma Bowman<\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n

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\n Shoppers walk through a forest of Christmas trees on the Snicker’s Gap Christmas Tree Farm in Bluemont, Va., in 2004. This season, a tightened tree supply dates back a decade ago, when fewer trees were planted during the recession.<\/p>\n

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Joe Raedle\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

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Joe Raedle\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

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If you usually ring in the holiday with a freshly cut evergreen, your reality this Christmas could very well be a scrawny Charlie Brown tree instead \u2014 or you may wind up paying more for a lush Fraser fir.<\/p>\n

This year, there is a tree shortage. Most growers blame the tightened supply on the Great Recession, says Valerie Bauerlein, who covered the story<\/a> for The Wall Street Journal<\/em>.<\/p>\n

A decade ago, “we were in a global economic malaise,” Bauerlein tells NPR’s Michel Martin. “And Christmas tree growers couldn’t sell the trees that they had cut, and for the price that they had in them, so then they planted less.”<\/p>\n

Christmas trees, as magical as they might seem, are still an agricultural crop. “Trees grow about a foot a year<\/a>,” Bauerlein says. “So eight, 10 years later, there’s a shortage. There’s more demand [now] because the economy’s prospering. And there are fewer trees to meet that demand.” The total acreage in production has dropped at least 30 percent since the early 2000s, she says.<\/p>\n