If you buy a Christmas tree, part of its journey to your living room may involve a helicopter.
John Schudel’s farm grows and ships over a million Christmas trees each winter out of Corvallis, Oregon. The crews don’t even stop for Thanksgiving.
This time of year, Schudel has about five helicopters on his farm at once. The pilots move large bundles of trees from the fields to loading areas.
“Just the sheer volume of trees that we do, that we harvest every year, we couldn’t physically possibly get the trees out in time by the old conventional method that we used to do back in the old days, which was tractors and wagons,” Schudel explained.
The trees are loaded into large shipping containers. Some of them go as far as Japan, Peru and even Afghanistan.
Washington and Oregon harvest more fresh Christmas trees than any other region in the U.S.
Copyright 2014 Northwest News Network