Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, August 21, 1993                   TAG: 9308210048
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MICHAEL CSOLLANY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

CHRISTMAS TREE GROWERS TRY TO BRANCH OUT

A glut of Christmas trees sent prices for pines and spruces plummeting. Some trees sold wholesale for $4 each.

Jim Johnson, a Virginia Tech Extension specialist in forestry, predicted the market would force 100 Virginia growers out of business within a year.

Now that the dust has settled, Virginia tree growers are showing they can persevere.

"Sure, there's a few people who went out of business, but people come in and out of the business all the time," said Jim Torbert, president-elect of the Virginia Christmas Tree Growers Association.

"What you will find, though, is that each individual grower is probably planting fewer trees," he said at the Roanoke Marriott, where the association is holding its annual convention.

Most Virginia tree growers buy their seedlings from the state, which reported seedling sales have decreased in recent years.

According to Wayne McBee, superintendent of nurseries and state forests at the Virginia Department of Forestry, the state sold 5 million seedlings to Christmas tree growers in 1985-86. That number dwindled to 445,000 seedlings in 1992-93.

The reduction reflects the middle of a natural economic cycle which began in the early 1980s, when high prices attracted many farmers into the business. But association leaders said most of the state's 1,400 growers will stay in the business because they hold other jobs, grow other crops or are retirees.

"There's very few growers whose livelihood depends solely on their sales of Christmas trees," said Richard Kreh, the association's current president.

In the meantime, the association has stressed marketing in order to compete with out-of-state growers.

Raising about 2 million Christmas trees per year, Virginia ranks eighth nationally in tree production, behind such states as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and North Carolina. But because the business only recently began to boom in Virginia, state growers have had to compete to break into their own local markets, Kreh said.

Many growers are participating in the Virginia's Finest program, which endorses high-quality agricultural products grown in the commonwealth. "By using the Virginia's Finest label, I got an extra customer who had been buying trees from out of the country for years," Torbert said.

Growers also are learning to tout the many different kinds of Christmas trees available in Virginia.

"Retailers have learned that we can grow virtually any kind of tree in Virginia. Being in the middle Atlantic, we can grow Northern species and Southern species. We also have all kinds of terrain," Torbert said.

By honing their marketing skills, growers are hoping to break into a huge market. An informal study by the Virginia Department of Agriculture found that about 90 percent of Northern Virginia retailers buy their trees from out-of-state sources.