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CapitalPress.com 11 Friday, December 20, 2019 Mistletoe: ‘Not every oak tree is going to have mistletoe’ Continued from Page 1 entrepreneurs in Oregon, where the parasitic plant commonly infects oak trees. They see it as a fun yet frantic way to earn extra money in the weeks leading up to the holidays. “The season is really short,” Ashley said. Genuine Oregon Mistletoe is run as a wholesale operation, selling about 10,000 bundles of mistletoe a year to nurseries, Christmas tree lots, Boy Scout troops and other holiday retailers around the U.S. The company has grown more sophisticated over time. Ashley’s uncle built a website that’s made Genuine Oregon Mis- tletoe more prominent than in the early days, when it was depen- dent mostly on word-of-mouth. Meanwhile, Garrett’s uncle lends him a truck equipped with a boom crane so he no longer has to endanger life and limb climb- ing ladders to the upper reaches of oak trees on a family mem- ber’s farm in Southern Oregon. “I don’t want to risk it, because if I were to get hurt, that would affect my full-time job,” he said. Genuine Oregon Mistletoe Garrett Huggins collects mistletoe from an infected oak tree in Southern Oregon with a truck equipped with a boom crane. Shotgun harvest For smaller-scale mistletoe sellers, blasting the plant out of a tree with a shotgun is often the preferred method of harvest. In their early years of collect- ing mistletoe, Janey Lee-Sut- ton and her grandson borrowed a 12-gauge shotgun from the farmer who owned the infected oak trees, but she eventually bought herself a smaller caliber .410-gauge. “I found the .410 doesn’t dam- age the mistletoe as much as the 12-gauge,” Lee-Sutton said. The idea of selling mistletoe was sparked by a request from her grandson, Malachi, who was then 4 years old, to buy Christ- mas presents for their family. Since he didn’t have any money or a job, Lee-Sutton decided that selling mistletoe at a nearby grocery story would be a good learning opportunity. Malachi borrowed some money for baggies and ribbons, which he later repaid his grand- mother while pocketing the profits. “I wanted to teach him a bit of economics,” she said. Once the boy grew older and took a gun safety course, Malachi helped with the shooting but dis- covered that growing older also has its disadvantages. “He started noticing that as he was bigger, people wouldn’t buy as much, so he started to bring his little sister,” Lee-Sutton said. With his younger sibling, Miko, serving as the public face of the operation, sales rebounded, and they ended up earning as much as $400 per year. Malachi outgrew the mistletoe Mateusz Perkowski/Capital Press Garrett Huggins and his wife, Ashley, prepare bundles of mistletoe for sale to retailers around the U.S. Their company, Genuine Oregon Mistletoe, has been operating for more than a decade. business once he became a teen- ager — he’s now a high school football player — and the farmer who provided access to the mistle- toe died, with his family selling off the property. “It was a great bonding expe- rience for me and my grandchil- dren,” Lee-Sutton said. sive amounts of the plant, Klest has found it’s most efficient to hire people to climb the trees. Though they’re strapped into harnesses, it’s still a precarious proposition that requires skill. “Oak trees can be kind of dan- gerous to climb because you can’t tell if a limb is rotted through or not,” Klest said. “intense” work that requires a “hard and fast” pace due to the short duration of the sales season, Klest said it’s also become a jovial holiday tradition for her company. “It’s almost like a social thing sometimes,” she said. The company that distrib- utes Klest’s mistletoe, Fibre- Dust, is primarily in the busi- ness of selling agricultural soil media made from coconut coir, or fiber, but realized it can also use its reach and expertise to sell mistletoe. The bundles are shipped to independent garden centers, major retailers such as Trader Joe’s and Walmart, and sold online through Amazon, said Andy Pidgeon, mar- keting director at FibreDust. Demand for mistletoe is sta- ble but slowly growing, he said. “It’s been very consistent with an upward tick each year.” Prices for mistletoe vary according to who sells it and the amount being sold. The Hugginses, for example, sell bundles for about $2 each but offer a 30-cent dis- count for orders of more than 100 bundles. Larger operation While the mistletoe operation run by Trillium Gardens is con- siderably larger, annually selling about 700,000 bundles through a distributor, it’s also not the main business for the native plant nurs- ery based in Eugene, Ore. Owner Sheila Klest began sell- ing mistletoe about two decades ago and now collects “thousands of pounds” a year from oak trees up to 100 miles from the nursery, with the permission of the landowners. “It’s at least a semi-truck load but probably a lot more than that,” she said. When harvesting such mas- Fragile crop The plant can be difficult to han- dle, as it’s fragile and gets moldy easily, and not everything collected is of salable quality, since its leaves can get sun-burned or drought- stressed, she said. Finding the best locations for optimal harvest also requires a certain expertise. “Not every oak tree is going to have mistletoe, or not very much,” Klest said. “You get a sense of what to do and how to handle it.” Holiday tradition Though the harvest and prepa- ration of mistletoe bundles is European cultivation In Oregon, mistletoe is col- lected from oak trees that it nat- urally infests, but in Europe, a related type is actually grown and harvested from fruit orchards, said Dave Shaw, a professor and forest health specialist for Oregon State University’s Extension Service. Apart from its potential for hol- iday profit, mistletoe plays a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” role in the natural world, Shaw said. “It’s both good and bad,” he said. For individual oaks, infected limbs will become stressed and eventually die back, particularly during periods of drought when mistletoe consumes the scarce water absorbed by the tree’s roots, Shaw said. At a certain point, trees get so overcome by the par- asitic plant that it can no longer be pruned away without killing them. “We believe there is a point you will have too much mistletoe in the crown, to the detriment of the tree,” he said. On the other hand, mistletoe berries and insects attracted to the plant serve as food for western bluebirds and other avian species, with the plant basically forming a microhabitat that improves biodi- versity, he said. “The flip side is when you get the wildlife biologists involved, they see it as a wildlife creator,” Shaw said. Though mistletoe has figured in folklore since pagan times, scien- tists still haven’t deciphered many questions about the plant — for example, why it flowers in sum- mer but doesn’t produce berries for more than a year, in the autumn of the following year, he said. “It’s a pretty mysterious plant. It’s a really cool plant,” Shaw said. Livestock impact Mistletoe-infected tree branches that fall to the ground can pose a threat to livestock, which can develop gastrointestinal prob- lems and abort pregnancies, said Shelby Filley, livestock and for- age specialist with OSU’s Exten- sion Service. “Sometimes animals are weird and they eat stuff, and you don’t know why exactly,” Filley said. Most likely to be affected by mistletoe toxicity are cattle, horses and goats, possibly because there’s “something lacking in their diet that they’re craving,” or because they’re simply hungry, she said. When releasing livestock into unfamiliar pastures, it’s a good idea to give them nutritious feed so they’re not tempted to experiment, Filley said. “That way, they’re not indiscriminate about eating things. They’re cautious about what they eat.” Other hazards For the Huggins family, the mistletoe business has involved negotiating other hazards — such as learning to avoid unreliable buyers who eventually stiff them on payments. “When you’ve never run an online business, you learn as you go,” said Ashley. On the whole, however, they appreciate the opportunity to turn a parasitic plant into a money-mak- ing enterprise they approach with an artistic flair, interweaving strands of mistletoe with sprigs of holly. “They all have a personal touch to them,” Garrett said. “It’s kind of like flower-arrang- ing but with mistletoe,” added Ashley. Radish: ‘The effect of Trade: U.S. agreed to reduce its existing import taxes on about $112B in Chinese goods Continued from Page 1 Two agreement would begin sending those letters immediately. — a tax that would His announcement came was to kill the market’ Sunday minutes after the House Judi- have likely led to higher prices Continued from Page 1 “Each of those actions was done at the advice of counsel, in fact they were done by counsel,” he said. If the farmers wanted to recover dam- ages, they could have filed a complaint against the bank’s former law firm for wrongfully initiating civil proceedings, Hawke said. “It’s not that they’re left hold- ing the bag and have no recourse.” Paul Conable, attorney for the radish seed farmers, countered that the bank sent letters to potential buyers before filing its lawsuit. The letters warned anyone against purchasing the seed from farmers out of concern they’d owe the bank money for the crop as well. “The effect of sending those letters was to kill the market,” Conable said. “What was communicated to the market was there was a dispute over the ownership of this seed. Stay away.” Though Northwest Bank’s lawyers did advise that it may hold some security inter- est in the seed, they did not say the bank held all the security interests needed to trump the growers’ security interests, he said. “Advising that you may own a dog is not advice that you own a particular dog.” The farmers can prevail in the lawsuit without having to prove the bank’s actions and allegations were frivolous, simply that it lacked a basis to believe it unambiguously owned the seed as collateral when sending the letters, Conable said. “Malice can be proved by evidence of no probable cause,” he said. Likewise, Northwest Bank can’t be immunized for all of its actions sim- ply by talking to a lawyer, Conable said. “It isn’t this get out of jail free card.” on many consumer goods. The administration also agreed to reduce its existing import taxes on about $112 billion in Chinese goods from 15% to 7.5%. In return, U.S. Trade Repre- sentative Robert Lighthizer told reporters, China agreed to buy $40 billion a year in U.S. farm products over two years, even though U.S. agricultural exports to China have never topped $26 billion a year. In addition, Beijing com- mitted to ending a long-stand- ing practice of pressuring companies to hand over their technology as a condition of gaining access to the Chinese market. Lighthizer said China also agreed to lift certain barriers to its market for such products as beef, poultry, seafood, pet food and animal feed. In all, the U.S. expects a $200 billion boost in exports over two years as a result of the deal. “We expect the trade deficit to go down for sure,” Lighthizer said, adding that the agreement will likely be signed the first week in January and take effect 30 days later. “Everything is written,” he said. “Everything is completely finished.” Yet the administration released no detailed paperwork on the agreement. And it said the text was still being translated between Chinese and English. In the past, the two sides had appeared to be close to firm Ng Han Guan Shoppers at a retail district pass by an American store in Bei- jing on Dec. 13. China’s deputy trade envoy says China and the U.S. have reached a trade deal. agreements only to see negotia- tions fall apart. At the same time, the Phase One agreement leaves some major issues unresolved, nota- bly complaints that Beijing unfairly subsidizes its own com- panies to give them a competi- tive edge in world markets. Many trade analysts said the agreement amounted to a mixed bag. “This deal should go a long way in reversing the downward spiral in bilateral trade relations and increasing certainty for U.S. businesses,” said Wendy Cut- ler, a former U.S. trade negotia- tor who is now vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute. But, she cautioned, “It’s unclear on how far the Phase One agreement goes in address- ing the key structural issues that brought the U.S. to the negotiat- ing table 17 months ago.’’ Other analysts were harsher. “With only limited conces- sions, China has been able to preserve its mercantilist eco- nomic system and continue its discriminatory industrial poli- cies at the expense of China’s trading partners and the global economy,” said Scott Kennedy, a China specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Trump could reverse course and renew tariffs. But Beijing has bought itself a likely respite from the daily uncertainty for at least a few months and perhaps for the remainder of Trump’s current term.” Trump had first announced a Phase One deal back on Oct. 11, but negotiations continued for two more months. The pres- ident, who announced the lat- est agreement via Twitter, said that work on a follow-up Phase ciary Committee approved impeachment charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, leading the White House to argue that the presi- dent “never stops working and continues to make successful deals that benefit this country.” In Beijing, officials said at a briefing that if the Trump administration reduces its tar- iffs, China will lower its trade penalties on American goods and also scrap plans for new tar- iffs Sunday. The world’s two biggest economies are battling over the industries of the future and the way China does business — an unorthodox mix of capitalism and state control. The administration accuses China of cheating in its drive to develop such advanced tech- nologies as driverless cars and artificial intelligence. The administration alleges — and independent analysts generally agree — that China steals tech- nology, forces foreign compa- nies to hand over trade secrets, unfairly subsidizes its own firms and throws up bureaucratic hur- dles for foreign rivals. Beijing rejects the accusa- tions and contends that Wash- ington is simply trying to sup- press a rising competitor in international trade. Since July 2018, the Trump administration has imposed a series of trade sanctions on China, sometimes changing or delaying planned tariff rates.
