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Holiday planters are all the rage this time of year. Maybe you've seen them stuffed with treetops or other greenery. They're a little pricey. They can cost $70 or more. Most of that is harvested from Northern forests, but not always legally. Dan Kraker of Minnesota Public Radio reports.
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DAN KRAKER, BYLINE: Anthony Bermel unlocks a gate into an 80-acre plot of forest outside the small northeast Minnesota town of Babbitt. It's the scene of a unique North Woods crime.
ANTHONY BERMEL: You know, you kind of have to look close.
KRAKER: Bermel is a conservation officer for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.
BERMEL: But as you look around at most of these black spruce trees, you know, a lot of them are stubby. You know, they're missing tops.
KRAKER: Bermel recently arrested a man for illegally cutting more than 5,000 spruce tops here on private and county land. He's charged with felony theft.
BERMEL: Yeah, so these are all fresh cuts. It still looks real fresh. It's still kind of sticky to the touch. You know, almost all these, as you look through here, they're all cut off.
KRAKER: It's hard, cold work in boggy swamps, often done in the dead of night to avoid detection. And if it's not done properly, lopping off the tops can kill the trees. But the payoff can be lucrative. Bermel and other DNR officers have chased down several bandit spruce thieves this year, who illegally cut and bundled thousands of spruce tops. DNR timber program supervisor Krista Roth says it's tough to see the forest after an illegal operation.
KRISTA ROTH: It's kind of devastating. You see a growing forest that we put a lot of time and energy into, and then you just see it kind of clear-cut.
KRAKER: The spruce thieves make up the small, sappy underbelly of a thriving industry of holiday decorative greenery. Every year, state and county foresters in Minnesota auction off more than a million spruce tops to legitimate harvesters, people like Dakota Swanson. The 29-year-old says he's harvested holiday greenery for almost his entire life. He started with balsam boughs.
DAKOTA SWANSON: As far back as I can remember, I was, you know, 4, 5 years old, and Dad and Grandma had me out sleeping on a pile of boughs.
KRAKER: Now Swanson runs a small operation with his wife and a couple other family members. He cuts some birch poles in the winter but now focuses mainly on the spruce top industry, which he says is booming.
SWANSON: I don't know. It's, like, green gold all of a sudden (laughter).
KRAKER: I called up Swanson while he was delivering a load of spruce tops to the Twin Cities. He says he delivers them all over the country in refrigerated semitrailers.
SWANSON: You can get about 40 to 50,000 treetops on a semi.
KRAKER: Swanson just finished a big harvest where he bid $80,000 to win the sale. That works out to about 70 cents a tree, but he's selling them for more than double that.
SWANSON: We're selling these treetops for 2 to $3 a piece, and the people we sell them to they turn more of a profit than that even off of them up to, you know, 6, $7 a tree.
KRAKER: Swanson takes pride in his work. When cut correctly, spruce tops grow back in five to 10 years. The Minnesota DNR's Brian Feldt says legitimate cutters also help manage the forest by thinning out trees.
BRIAN FELDT: It is a benefit, for sure, to be able to do these on the legitimate side.
KRAKER: But as long as spruce tops fetch up to three bucks a pop, Feldt says thieves will continue to cut them illegally to cash in on Northern Minnesota's green gold.
For NPR News, I'm Dan Kraker in Northern Minnesota.
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