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BABBITT—On an 80-acre patch of boggy black spruce swamp outside the small northeast Minnesota town of Babbitt, the telltale signs of a unique North Woods crime are everywhere.
“You kind of have to look close,” said Anthony Bermel, a conservation officer with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources who patrols this area. “But as you look around at most of these black spruce trees, a lot of them are stubby, they’re missing tops.” Some trees have been cut close to the ground, leaving short stumps. Elsewhere, the top two to four feet of young spruce trees have been lopped off.
“So these are all fresh cuts. It’s still kind of sticky to the touch,” said Bermel, who earlier this year arrested Blake Buschman of Babbitt, 37, who was charged with felony theft for illegally cutting more than 5,000 spruce tops here, on private and adjacent St. Louis County land.
It’s not the first time he’s apprehended Buschman. “I’ve caught him over and over and over and over and over again over the years,” Bermel said.
He and other DNR officers across northern Minnesota spent a good chunk of their fall chasing down bandit spruce thieves, who have illegally cut and bundled thousands of tree tops from private, county, state and federal land, often in the dead of night.
The illicit activity is driven by a seemingly insatiable demand for holiday décor. For decades there has been a strong market for balsam boughs and other greenery.
But the demand for black spruce tops has soared in recent years, driven largely by the popularity of decorative holiday pots stuffed with spruce and other North Woods material like balsam, cedar and birch poles, that fetch $60 to $70 and often much more at Costco and other retailers.
“There’s a booming, booming legitimate market,” explained Bermel. “ And when you have opportunity like that, there’s going to be other people that are doing it not legitimately, that are stealing them.”
GREEN GOLD
The theft that’s occurring makes up a tiny fraction of the legitimate market for decorative holiday greenery in northern Minnesota.
Every year, land managers for the Minnesota DNR, the U.S. Forest Service and counties issue permits to cut tens of thousands of spruce tops and other items from the state’s northern forests.
In recent years the DNR has sold the rights to cut about a half million spruce tops annually. Those numbers exceeded 1 million in 2021 and 2022, when the Canadian border closed during the COVID pandemic, preventing the shipping of holiday greenery into the U.S. This year St. Louis County sold permits to cut about 470,000 spruce tops. The county earned $246,000 in the auction.
On state forest land in northeast Minnesota, the base price the DNR offers is about 50 cents per spruce tip. But the winning bids often exceed that, said Brian Feldt, area forest supervisor for the Minnesota DNR in Tower.
“Our average auction price has basically doubled since just a few years ago,” said Feldt.
One of those people bidding those prices up is Dakota Swanson, a 29-year-old from Embarrass who has been harvesting holiday greenery for as long as he can remember.
“I was four or five years old, and Dad and Grandma had me sleeping on a pile of [balsam] boughs,” recalled Swanson. “And then it just progressed from there.”
Now Swanson runs a small operation, with his wife and a couple other family members. He cuts some birch poles in the winter, but focuses mainly on the spruce top industry.
“It’s like green gold all of a sudden,” he said, while on the way to the Twin Cities to deliver a load of spruce tops.
Swanson delivers all around the country. He uses refrigerated semi trailers that can haul 40,000 to 50,000 tree tops at a time.
This year Swanson cut about 180,000 tree tops. He recently finished a big harvest on 100 acres of St. Louis County land. He bid nearly $80,000 to win the sale— more than he paid for his house, he joked. That works out to 69 cents per tree top.
But he’s selling them for more than double that.
“We’re selling these tree tops for $2 to $3 a piece, and the people we sell them to, they turn more of a profit than that, up to $6, $7 a tree,” Swanson said.
MULTIPLE BENEFITS
Swanson takes pride in his work providing a high-quality product that’s harvested sustainably.
When spruce tops are cut properly they can grow back in five to seven years or so. Swanson and other legitimate harvesters also provide another benefit to land managers. They often thin away spruce, tamarack and other trees.
“So we’re actually getting basically a pre-commercial thinning accomplished, and then actually benefiting by selling that product too at the same time,” explained Feldt.
He said remaining trees then do better because they have less competition. “They’re spaced out, their crowns have a little more room to grow,” he said.
When people cut tops illegally, land managers lose out on the opportunity to regulate where the harvest should take place, and more importantly how the cutting is done.
Krista Roth, timber program supervisor for the Minnesota DNR in Tower, surveyed the site near Babbitt after the illegal cutter was apprehended.
“It’s kind of devastating,” Roth said. “You see a growing forest that we put a lot of time and energy into with aerial seeding, monitoring, stocking, and then you just see it kind of clear cut well before it’s even become a mature forest.”
