First in Future: Holiday Tree Economics with Mike Walden and Tommy Burleson

Summary:  The use of the evergreen trees to symbolize the arrival of winter goes back well beyond 2000 years. But over time they came to be one of the symbols of the holidays. Our special Podcast holiday edition, features our state’s favorite economist, Mike Walden and Tommy Burleson, the former 7’2.5” NC State center, who now farms North Carolina holiday trees. We have both men talking about the $100 million industry.

Excerpts: “North Carolina has a large Christmas tree industry and we are in fact the number two state, second only to Oregon and in 2017 North Carolina harvested 3.5 million trees that had a retail value of $250 million dollars with the farmer getting about $100 million of that.”

One economic study that Mike Walden does, is a look at the agriculture industry broadly, which is used by the agriculture commissioner, and people tend to associate financial impact with number of employees and there is not always a one to one correspondence there. We have very few people actually on the farm, yet it is still an enormous industry, because it is very technologically capable.

Listen to the podcast: