9 Fascinating Farming Jobs | Big Business | Insider Business

from shearing fluffy sheep to harvesting ancient cork trees and trashing mountains of potatoes farming isn't easy i work really long hard hours this season we dive into the big business of getting our food wool and even christmas trees [Music] our first story takes us to portugal where these century-old trees produce the stoppers for some of our favorite drinks portugal produces about half of the world's cork wine stoppers most come from these trees here in the allentejo region but harvesting a tree takes years of expertise and steady hands we went inside the world's largest cork forest to see how portugal produces 40 million cork stoppers a day these are cork oak trees they're so special they've been protected under portuguese law since 1209 so harvesters have strict rules to follow the trees can't be touched for the first 15 years of their lives and they can only be harvested every nine years so the bark has time to grow back in between since the first two harvests of a new tree don't produce the best cork harvesters have to wait 33 years to get the good stuff every summer harvesters peel off the bark using century old techniques just foreign to prevent that workers leave the inner layer untouched we can harvest the bark of the tree without damaging the bark so these cells can grow again without any impact in the life of the tree because the trees regenerate they'll never run out of cork the oldest tree on record is an estimated 200 years old and has been harvested 20 times in its lifetime after the cork planks are stripped from the trees they're pressed between concrete slabs for six months then they're sent to a processing facility to be boiled for at least an hour that's to sterilize the planks and make them softer this machine punches out the stoppers we see in our wine bottles those corks are shipped out to a hundred different countries but the rest of the cork left behind in this process isn't wasted we don't waste anything even the small residues all that byproduct can be made into things like flooring or granulated stoppers used to cork less expensive wines cork harvesting goes back millennia egyptians use stoppers and tombs and the romans used cork in shoes today portugal harvests a hundred thousand tons of cork every year and owns a third of the cork oak forests in the world that is a real retainer of co2 protected for biodiversity this tree that separates the south of europe and north africa from the sarah desert so it's a barrier to desertification cork sustainability was part of what saved the portuguese wine stopper in the early 2000s winemakers began turning to synthetic closures and screw tops for bottles and the value of cork plummeted but as consumers became more environmentally conscious in the 2010s the movement against single-use plastics that is happening all over the world it's a real opportunity for cork cork exports grew 52.3 percent in nearly a decade in 2018 portugal passed a record billion dollars worth of cork exports exports we kept that number and very close to 1.1 billion in 2019 and now we are waiting for the final numbers of 2020 but as a global pandemics as a global crisis we are expecting also some impact in our business despite the covet 19 pandemic the 2020 harvest didn't stop the car car was this year very smooth we are talking about an activity that is done at open air itself the industry's success in the last decade has allowed portugal to take its cork products into other industries from construction to autumn automotive industry to aerospace shield to sports fashion clothes but even as cork demand continues to grow harvesters plan to keep doing things the same way they always have with a good axe [Music] next up we're headed to new zealand home to thousands of sheep in need of a haircut here in the new zealand countryside 25 000 sheep are sheared in just 10 days as a nightmare trying to keep the sheep still just got kicked in the face but a good shearer can share a sheep in a minute and the sheep won't even just sit there this wool normally would be cleaned dyed woven and sold across the globe as rugs and clothes but due to a growing dependence on synthetic fabrics and a trade war with china the value of wool has plummeted all of a sudden a key revenue to their business has just disappeared overnight and not only is the revenue gone it's actually turned into a cost and it's left farmers like andrew and meredith with bales and bales of wool they can't sell now farmers are basically giving it away or throwing it away so what happened back in the 1950s wool was basically like gold in new zealand farmers would produce one clip of wool and be able to pay off a whole piece of land like buy a farm outright that was the golden era for farmers in new zealand that's when andrew's grandparents bought ruinoy station here in taihope new zealand i'm third generation it's great to carry on what dad and granddad have slaved away at doing andrew was working for his dad when the industry hit its peak in 1988 with wool exports valuing 1.9 billion dollars that made wool new zealand's second biggest export after meat andrew took over the farm about 15 years ago and since he's grown it to about 7 600 acres raising 25 000 sheep not a bad office when you get a view like this swimming awesome so quiet especially this time of the day it's beautiful andrew raises romney sheet their coarse wool has to be sheared twice a year for the sheep to stay healthy without taking the wool off they do get dags and sort of dirty bottoms and stuff like that and that can attract flies and if they attract flies flies can actually land on them and lay their eggs that will actually kill a shape also think about how hot a new zealand summer is in 90 degrees fahrenheit that wall it's like wearing a great big furry jacket in the middle of the summer if they're really really woolly when they lie down they get stuck on their back and they actually can't stand up again and they die seriously in january andrew staff heads out to round up sheep for the first shearing of the year basically all the mustering is done on horseback awesome dogs using 20 horses four atvs and eight dogs they gather up 3 600 sheep at a time they all have a couple of hitting dogs and some hunaways so the hitting dogs are used for just hitting the sheep and getting them going in the right direction and the hunaways are the ones that bark and move the stock along it's all done on whistle command leave a different whistle for left and right and stop and go got them heading the right way they'll start coming coming around and joining up with the other lock they're all rounded up into this shed last lot brought in from mustering they'll be drafted into their different lines the sheep are separated into groups lambs or babies and adult use or female sheep we've got the used wool here 36 micron it's a lot coarser and harder so it's best used for flooring like carpets and rugs and then lambswool which is 29 micron it's a lot softer finer so it's better for blankets and clothes the sheep are each weighed and lined up for shearing andrew hired a gang of eight contract shearers for the job we're under the shearing shed right now which is pretty hot noisy and dusty and we're sharing about 2 000 sheep today the gang brings its own tools what you've got here is pretty much the same as what your barbers will have we call this a cutter at the top and the comb at the bottom which we put on every time it's just scissor action that goes across one by one travis will pull a lamb out so you'll start off with the belly it's easiest way to get that out of the way and then it's just a rhythm that you kind of want to do to get around the sheet and it's a pattern but you're basically just taking off as much wool as you can that cutter will last only about 15 minutes before it gets dull sharpen the gear so just get a clean clean cut on the sheet [Music] but don't worry this doesn't hurt the sheep it is actually just a haircut for the sheep so you try and do every sheep the same it makes it easy on your body as well makes your sheep comfortable making sure that they're in the best state when they go out minimizing nicks and controlling them properly it's a tough job shearing gangs work long hours in the heat wrestling with livestock oh you're right did you get a kick in the nose as a nightmare trying to keep the sheep still they kick and wriggle and stuff like that a good shearer could share a sheep in like one minute and to watch them do it is amazing they are so fast the more you do it the more experienced you are but at the start it's never easy it takes a big toll on your body and mind these guys are so good at taming sheep they can cheer over 300 in a day rouseys gather up the fleece and pressers squish it into huge bales 200 kilos a bale in 2015 andrew would have sold a stock quickly for seven dollars a kilo but today i was just talking to the wall broker last night he sort of came back with this dollar 20. i'm thinking oh god this is not this is not great when you add in the increasing costs of shearer contracts it's now more expensive to shear the sheep than the wool is actually worth my farm five years ago we might have been making net cost fifty or sixty thousand dollars revenue so it's gone from making 50 to costing 30 so it's an 80 000 a year change it's so destroying to see the wool prices so low when it's the most amazing natural product so why is the wool worth so little well demand is way down because a few decades ago cheaper synthetic fabrics began replacing coarse wool in flooring products wool is biodegradable sustainable and fire resistant but it's expensive to be honest the average person can't afford 100 wool carpets synthetic rugs are made of plastic fiber so they're harmful for the environment and are highly flammable but they're a third of the price and they're growing popularity took a huge swing at wool's demand then things got rocky with new zealand's biggest customer sixty percent of new zealand's wool goes to china andrew and meredith sold all of their lamb's wool to clothing factories there we do have a lot of our eggs in the chinese basket that proved to be a bad bet for new zealand they come in and they buy and they buy and they stop so our wool prices dive in 2016 china first pulled back its demand for coarse wool and the price tumbled in 2019 the trump administration slapped china with fresh tariffs on textiles sold in the u.s struggling to sell its manufactured wool clothes in the u.s china slowed its orders for new zealand wool that can cause all sorts of problems and supply chains and markets because all of a sudden you've got your major customer not wanting it then in 2020 the kovid 19 pandemic closed down clothing factories in china andrew and meredith were stuck with bales of wool so like many farmers in new zealand they stockpiled it waiting for prices to go back up but it can only be kept for about a year before it starts to deteriorate but a year into this pandemic and prices still haven't rebounded stockpiling didn't work some farmers were forced to throw away part of their wool stock others had to get creative meredith found tracy tracy takes the lamb's wool meredith couldn't sell and converts it into throw blankets these are the throws that we're manufacturing for to try and give them some added value to their fiber by getting it processed into yarn and then pressing us into throws which then they can sell for a high margin workers in wellington clean and dye the wool and then send it to tracy when the wool arrives we then warp it we then weave it you'd probably need to allocate a kilo per throw workers inspect and mend each throw by hand the blankets are then cleaned raised meaning fluffed up and then packaged even though there's growing interest for these throws online it's barely made a dent in andrew and meredith's losses tracy only buys their lamb's wool but the majority of andrew and meredith's output is coarse wool which is still caught up in trade wars to weather this storm some farmers are turning to breeds that shed their own wool to avoid those rising shearing costs others are pivoting to meat production or selling their farms to forestry and getting out of sheep farming altogether it would be a huge economic negative for our country if we saw the world industry disappear what's left is a once booming wool industry on the brink we've seen that sheep flock go from 17 million to today we're about 20 22 million we're the last wool weaver in new zealand there used to be a scouring plant almost in every town farmers are hoping to expand exports outside of volatile china and convince consumers of the benefits of wool over synthetic a lot of consumers are now really starting to think about what's in the products they're buying and prepared to pay more for natural environmentally friendly products and tom says the industry needs to diversify you're not just dependent on a floor you can put wool through the whole house you can put walls through the whole office as well wall can be used in sofas beds drapes upholstery and even insulation we're pretty nervous really to be honest yeah and i think if we had a crystal ball that would be fantastic but nobody knows where things are headed for now andrew and meredith aren't abandoning the industry just yet at the end of the day you've still got to share the wall off them and that mars will be worth something so we'll hang in there and see whether we can ride the roller coaster so how many have you named no they're not they're not pets haven't named any of them on the other side of the world these farmers are being forced to throw away their livelihoods because of the pandemic these potatoes aren't going to end up on your dinner table their final destination is this hole we're in the small town of sheridan montana on a potato farm normally this time of year bill and peggy would be sending their potatoes to be planted instead they're throwing away 700 tons the potatoes have been awful good to us for a lot of years but this year it just really turned sour and the same thing is happening across the northwest i mean it was just unprecedented it's the supply chain from the growers to the supermarket that got interrupted more than half of our market shut down by government mandate now farmers across idaho and montana are stuck with mountains of potatoes so why did this all happen we visited bouyon ranch where peggy and bill have been growing potato seed for 59 years normally potato production across the northwest looks like this it starts with a seed grower like buyon where farmers grow a variety of seed strains virtually all the potatoes grown started out from a certified seed and that that's a fairly rigorous process that avoids disease imperfections bouillon grows three different disease-free seed strains umatilla clear water and rusted burbank potatoes each potato variety goes to a specific grower in either the fresh or processed segment in the fresh segment you're actually seeing the potato in its true form that's foods like a raw potato at a grocery store or oak rotten potatoes at your favorite restaurant the other side of that is we call it our process segment you don't actually see the potato you see the by-product or the end result of that that's the bag of potato chips the french fries at mcdonald's or the pre-cut fries in the frozen section if you're a fresh product grower you'll plant a different variety or different genetic line of potatoes if you're a process grower you'll grow a different product line just some fry better they have a better color to them others grow better now back to the farm potato growers get the seed from bouion and start planting in march then they harvest in early fall once the potatoes are out of the ground they go into storage or are sent to a factory where they're cleaned and turned into either fresh or processed potatoes when coveted hit we had a huge run on retail which lasted for about a week to two weeks but then when we shut off all the restaurants that's when everything came out of kilter potatoes for food service like restaurants hotels and catering make up an estimated 55 of all potato crops think of everything from white table restaurants clear down to your fast quick service so when food service establishments shut down because of coven 19 it was a chain effect processors cut down orders with growers out of options the growers cut their orders with seed farmers and more than half of the industry's potatoes were stranded on seed farms in peggy's case her customers in washington were cut back more than 50 and she and bill were stuck with tons of seed they'd normally sell you can't take these some of these facilities that are built directly for food service and then tomorrow flip a switch and make them able to sell into retail you're asking a square peg in a round hole i guess is the best analogy i can come up with the surplus potatoes also couldn't just be sent to grocery stores grocery stores or retails would have been bursting to the seams with potatoes if we redirected all that we had high hopes and maybe something would turn up you know that in a month or so we might be able to send them somewhere for some kind of processing but this year's there's just no no market for them and we're just taking them out taking them into a burial pit peggy and bill have been forced to bury 1.4 million pounds of potatoes in total it's costing us money just to bury these i mean between our time and labor and renting a large excavator to dig the hole and and cover them it's it i mean it's it's not free just to throw them away to us it's an expense just to get rid of when you dump that many potatoes the financial hit yeah i mean that was what's so heart sickening is the financial verb it takes a tremendous amount of capital to grow a crop of potatoes bankruptcies are starting to creep up before the pandemic zack estimates idaho farmers were looking at a 15-year high in potato prices now they're facing a 20-year low zak says a 100-pound sack of potatoes went from costing about twelve dollars a sack to three dollars a sack and a farmer needs it to cost at least five dollars to break even peggy and bill are facing a hundred and forty thousand dollars in losses for farmers across idaho and montana that number comes to eight million dollars some of these farmers are looking at red all over their balance sheet and there's no black to be seen they'll be looking into increasing their lines of credit they'll be needing to remortgage some of their property you know just trying to free up more capital to try and survive for next year when you put all your work and effort into growing them and the expense and the pride of what you grow and then to just completely just throw it away and waste it to save some of the potatoes from going to waste bouillon ranch got creative peggy and bill have given out roughly 75 000 pounds of potatoes to the surrounding community she's organized two or three giveaway days and we've had pickups from 100 miles away people come and got potatoes she's distributing them down on our street in town just set up and people stop they give them a bag of potatoes and just to try to get somebody benefit from even though they're losing money on them they'd rather see someone eating then nothing happened at all farmers are also mashing up potatoes into a compost-like mixture to feed cattle next year we've put them into this pile and mixed straw then we're going to put plastic over the top of it and let it get totally broke down by next fall at that point if everything is okay and the rations then we'll start feeding the calves with them it's money out of our pocket trying to find another use of the spuds but all of that effort barely made a dent in the number of stranded potatoes right now it's like 200 000 roughly in there with everything i would say it's pretty devastating you know for a small operation for us all in all an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of potatoes are trapped in the supply chain across the us if i was advising a year ago not knowing what was going to happen i wouldn't have told them to do anything differently they did now if we'd have anticipated covet wrong and had a short crop a very small crop it would have been devastated to food hunger we'd have had mass shortage of potatoes and that would have been even worse luckily zach says all this food waste won't lead to a shortage next year farmers are still planting potatoes just not as much going forward this year i think the farmer's doing the right thing we thought you know let's plant what we do and take the risk we already have the ground prepared and we have we raise our most of our own seed and buy some so i mean you might as well just carry on i guess that's kind of the farm and ranch bad years you just start over the next year and hope for a better you know better season if if you didn't you'd quit a long time ago that's the plight of a farmer we're always looking for next year farmers farmed for the love of farming and even in tough times we still will continue to farm for the love of farming [Music] the pandemic didn't just threaten america's supply of potatoes it also came after its meat when coronavirus outbreaks shut down meat processing plants across the u.s animals headed here were suddenly stranded here as time has gone on and plants haven't been able to operate that's created a big backlog of pigs with nowhere to send their pigs some farmers were forced to euthanize their herds you're literally talking about millions and millions of pigs that were intended to go to market but are still remaining on the farm the backup at farms led to record-breaking meat prices and cleared out shelves the u.s was in the midst of a meat shortage you start with the ethics of it like animals live and die to make your product and then you get to the concentration of it it's a pretty hairy beast but why did this all happen and how can we avoid it from happening in the future america is the world's leading producer of beef and poultry it's also one of the top producers of pork in the world in the u.s alone an estimated 9 billion animals are slaughtered a year in order to process all that meat the industry is efficient and concentrated simply put as many animals as possible move from the farm to the slaughterhouse as quickly as possible when the system works u.s meat prices are among the most affordable on the planet but that efficiency becomes a problem in the face of cobit 19. for one workers operate in tight quarters they're in refrigerated environments with recirculating air this was an environment in which covid could apparently be spread easily from worker to worker an estimated 25 000 meat packing workers have contracted covet 19 and outbreaks in 167 plants forced 38 in south dakota minnesota and iowa to close since only a small number of plants handle most of the industry's meat when any one of them closes it has an impact on the entire industry it's like the only store shut down in town and you can't get milk if you're a farmer by early may beef and pork plants were running at about 40 below the processing volumes we saw just a year ago so that's an enormous reduction in processing volumes and caused all kinds of disruptions this has hit farmers like mike hard when kovitz started really impacting the plants our percentage of utilization of the plants just kind of kept going down and down and down that's created a real backlog of pigs every year mike and his co-op send about a hundred and fifty thousand hogs to the smithfield plant in sioux falls south dakota but when covet 19 closed that plant they had nowhere to send their animals we got our letter april 11th that the smithfield plant was going to be closed turned out to be four weeks that they didn't receive any hogs in sioux falls remember the meat industry is streamlined to be exact we're looking for a very uniform end product last ones are 284 these might be i think they're going to be pretty close to that it's real similar all the pigs mike or any farmer sends to a plant have to weigh about 280 pounds if it gets above 300 330 pounds the plants are just not configured to take animals of that size mike tried to put them on a diet right now it's just basically ground corn there's some vitamins and minerals and salt in there now usually we would have soybean meal dried distillers grains from the ethanol process in there as well but those feeds are more expensive and we were trying to slow their growth this diet should slow them down to about one pound a day and we're usually they're gaining two two and a half pounds a day at this stage but even on a diet they were growing beyond the 280 pound mark by the day it was a no-win scenario they had shipments of baby pigs still coming in from nursing farms they were running out of space and feed the current pigs were getting too fat and factories were still closed last case situation is unfortunately where farmers have to consider euthanizing some animals combined mike's cooperative has had to euthanize over 3 400 pigs about a half million dollars worth but mike estimates if you add in the feed costs the loss for his co-op is upwards of 1.5 million dollars i don't know it's even possible to compare the economic losses to sort of the psychological you know impact that this has on producers neither one are positive it's really kind of a double whammy i think the situation mike's co-op based was happening all over the country so one way to think about it is like this in this country we have a processing capacity of about 500 000 pigs per day remember the industry was running at about 40 below capacity if you do the math every day that's an extra 200 000 pigs they were meant to go to market but instead stayed on the farm so you do that for five days which happened that's a million extra pigs that were gonna go to market after a couple of weeks that's millions of pigs at risk of being euthanized all of this is why consumers have seen higher meat prices and those empty shelves which jason estimates may stretch out for at least another six months since mid-may things have started getting better factories like smithfield sioux falls have reopened with limited production and social distancing measures euthanization of animals has slowed and as a result production and meat prices have started to stabilize but what can we do so this doesn't happen again one option is to rely more on smaller vertically integrated farms when you see a piece of meat in the grocery store it's typically been touched by 15 or 20 different types of companies and all of those companies are hyper specialized and they operate at a really efficient scale that's anya she owns belcampo farms a vertically integrated meat company out in northern california our supply chain relies entirely on our own infrastructure we own our own farms our own slaughterhouse and several direct-to-consumer businesses velcampo is home to three thousand grass-fed organic cattle they have thirty thousand acres to roam and live seven to ten times longer than conventional cattle the slaughtering process is also slowed down with only 50 to 60 animals processed a day in a slaughterhouse that belcampo owns just 20 minutes from the farm i think of it as like intentional inefficiency and because volcano exists outside of the normal meat industry we're not reliant on the broader meat infrastructure since we have our own slaughterhouse that we've had extremely aggressive and proactive safety measures in we have not had any issues this also made it easier for anya to start social distancing measures in the plant before the cdc required it we implemented mandatory attempt checking and a questionnaire every day as of like march 18. direct-to-consumer models could be another shake-up in the industry cutting out distribution centers anya's e-commerce site saw unprecedented traffic and her app delivering meat to homes in san francisco and la went from like 3 000 to 20 000 users in the past month as for the bigger meat companies at the heart of this issue jason has a few ideas more medium-sized plants for starters so if one goes down it doesn't take the whole supply chain with it even if you're one of the large processors you may think about giving up some of that economies of scale to maybe reduce some risks but jason says the most effective change would be automation robots don't get sick it's just hard we're not putting together car parts that are uniform in shape and size animals are different sizes shapes weights but whether or not the meat industry will make any of these changes comes down to what the consumers demand and how much they're willing to pay for any real changes it's been a choice we've been making with our wallets for years where we love cheap protein our customer is going to pay up for a secure supply chain and i think that the more we talk about the more people are going to raise our hands and say i'm opting out [Music] from pig pens to oyster cages our next stop takes us underwater these cages contain more than 30 million oysters they are grown here at one of the largest oyster farms on the east coast but these little guys are hard to cultivate they need constant care or else an entire crop can get wiped out it's kind of a good mixture of science and heavy labor so it's hard work long hours you know it's seven days a week and the work doesn't stop there after the oysters are harvested it's a race against time to get them safely to consumers we went inside ward oyster company to see how it harvests 3.5 million oysters every year bringing them from algae tanks to your plate this is john vigliada he began his career on the water when he was 13 years old i started putting oysters in cages in 1995. this aquaculture farm sprawls over 884 acres the size of over 147 roman coliseums it includes a hatchery nursery and part of virginia's mob jack bay farming and oyster begins in the hatchery here biologist chris smith puts 3 000 adult oysters into a shallow tank called a spawning table then he artificially creates the conditions that cause oysters to spawn we're controlling the temperature in the tank specifically it's the all you can eat buffet getting them ready to spawn when the oysters spawn they release their eggs and sperm directly into the water the eggs and sperm are put into tanks where they turn into oyster larvae one billion oyster babies are produced in these tanks every year they remain there for about three weeks feeding on algae and growing shells we grow about seven different species of algae to create a menu for our oysters and clams it's amazing to see the algae kind of bloom and then to watch the oysters and clams grow in our facility it's very gratifying when the oysters get to be about a quarter inch long they are placed outside in upweller tanks and it's a system which allows a large quantity of water to be flown past the oysters giving them a super abundant amount of food after about two months of feeding staff check on the size of the oysters we'll take these oysters here that are larger and they'll go in a cage to go overboard and then these oysters here will go back into the system for further grow out to where they can get to be this size and eventually go in a cage the cages full of oysters are then tossed into the mob jack bay we have about twenty five hundred to three thousand cages contained in all the cages that we have out in the mob object bay you probably have somewhere around 30 million oysters that is a lot of oysters if all of them were harvested at once and put into your freezer you could eat over 800 oysters every day for 100 years and you would still have leftovers nicely done farmers monitor the weather closely excessive rainfall can dilute the salt in the water which could kill the oysters and water temperature is also a factor oysters grow best between 60 degrees fahrenheit and 80 degrees if you go above that it just gets so hot that they will stop growing or slow down significantly if it goes below that they go dormant if all goes well after six months the cages are removed from the water and the oysters are brought to a separator this machine sorts them by size if they are not big enough to sell they go back in the water oysters can take around one to two years to go from hatchery to market after separation market-sized oysters are washed tagged with order information and boxed once the oysters come out of the bay the clock starts ticking the team has to harvest the oysters transport them to the shop add ice package them and place them in the cooler within two hours to meet fda guidelines the boxes are put into a refrigerated truck and shipped to distributors across the u.s who pay around 40 cents per oyster in virginia wild caught oysters actually sell for less around 30 cents we probably sell our market oysters to 10 or 15 different states in the country but our oysters end up everywhere and occasionally for local orders john delivers himself and then you have the tag here all right thank you very much okay customers say that they're fresh they're delicious since 1996 they've gone from farming 100 000 oysters per year to 3.5 million in 2019 besides selling oysters to eat the company also sells around 70 million baby oysters each year to farmers up and down the east coast aquaculture is one of the fastest growing food production sectors in the world while the amount of seafood caught in the wild has not increased by much since the 1980s demand is up nearly 150 percent aquaculture is filling the gap [Music] it is predicted that by 2030 60 of the fish available for human consumption will come from aquaculture virginia has made a big bet and doubled down on farming oysters today the state is the largest oyster producer on the east coast but the pandemic has hurt business like no natural disaster that we've ever had oysters market value and restaurant orders plummeted so we're getting hit both with reduced orders and a reduced price for the product that we do sell and on top of that after a stellar 2019 john stocked the bay hoping for an abundant future we have a record amount of product in the water and our sales are off almost 50 percent while 2020 was a roller coaster ride for ward oyster company sales have finally started to pick up john is optimistic about the future no matter what happens he plans to be on the water i love being out on the water my office is on the water you can't get it much better than that and salt water is in my veins [Music] our last stop takes us to new york where the city's most magical christmas tree was found in someone's front yard [Music] the iconic rockefeller tree didn't come from a christmas tree farm it came from someone's backyard here in oneana new york this year's tree is an 80 year old norway spruce found in al dix yard 375 feet tall 45 feet wide and about 11 tons i found this tree back in 2016. the head gardener for rockville center happened to be riding down the road and he saw the tree eric stopped by al's general store to see if al and his family would donate their tree to rockefeller center she asked me if we could do it we said sure but they had to wait a few years it wasn't tall enough when they were tall enough i've been looking at it for a couple years i watered it i fed it over a couple years and then this summer when i came by it just looked great and it looked perfect and it was the year to take it when the spruce was unveiled as the 2020 tree the rockefeller team got to work protecting and preparing it we had a 24 hour day guards eric especially he's been here every day there's been like family we're going to miss them being outside every day but getting this massive spruce to the center of manhattan is no easy task [Music] first it had to come out of the ground we came up and we started tying it i took us all the way to saturday afternoon eric hired a crew of local workers to tie up the branches that's to make sure they're secure through the cutting and the drive and then the crane came and we built the crane and put the counterweights on it so that it could hold the trade the crane is already attached to the tree when the workers begin cutting eric and his team have private property and bystanders to think about [Music] it takes only a few minutes to saw through the massive trunk leaving the giant tree hanging in the air now we moved it over to the truck the tree is laid on its side on that 115 foot long trailer and strapped into place the tree is going to take a nice little trip down in new york city often the most complicated part is getting it right from the property where it is onto the highway what is normally a three and a half hour drive takes up to three days with a 75 foot tree you don't want to get the rockefeller center christmas tree stuck in traffic and of course the city of new york is always tremendously helpful with us in terms of closing the streets and making sure that we're able to have a smooth arrival into the city normally the tree arrives to big crowds but this year because of covet 19 it pulled up to an empty rockefeller center we like to think that tree arrival day is the start of the holiday season officially in new york and certainly this has been a year unlike any other so it felt all the more important to us to continue those traditions carefully it's lifted off the truck then tilted right side up and slid into the sturdy tree stand in the middle of rockefeller center as if putting up the tree in rockefeller plaza is not enough crews working on the rockefeller center christmas tree got a little surprised they found a tiny owl this year workers found a little owl hidden inside the tree and the bird went viral as people guested hitch to ride all the way from upstate new york he was brought safely to a shelter and named appropriately rockefeller rocky for short also blowing up the internet the fact that the tree looked a little bare on arrival but what might look like a scrawny tree now got a big facelift this is the extension to make it nice and full over the next couple of weeks the tree was surrounded in scaffolding as the trees branches settled and fluffed out it's been reported workers also attached branch extensions to make the tree appear fuller we stick a hole in the tree put the branch back in boom wire it in boom like a wing it's like a weight like a weed yes it's just like a weep [Music] then they draped 50 000 led lights around it and topped it with a 900 pound swarovski crystal star and finally on december 2nd the rockefeller christmas tree is lit up this year through a virtual ceremony the tree is always real come you can smell it you can see it this year we probably won't let you touch it thanks to uh to cover but i i can assure you it is a very real tree we have the pine cones to prove it and when it's all over we take the lumber when it is done and we turn it we donate to habitat for humanity and it turns into homes for the future it's going to be a rough season for some at least the tree didn't get camping we'll go in the history books right yeah there you go you

Channel: Business Insider

Views: 2,279,295

Keywords: Business Insider, Business News, marathon, big business, farming, new zealand, sheep farms, cork forest, trade wars

Id: tfexF_8tVuY

Length: 41min 6sec (2466 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 04 2021