94 



Unfortunately, all the trees are lost to this grower since he 

 would never dream of selling any when they were under water or in 

 saturated soil for four months or more and under such stress. He 

 has done some research and checked with other Midwest growers on 

 replacing the 6,000 trees that he lost. The grower calculates 

 that the wholesale catalog price of the trees i6 over $581,000. 

 That does not include freight to get them shipped to his nursery, 

 labor to replant the trees, cost of disposing of the dead trees, 

 or preparing the soil for replanting. He has computer 

 inventories with prices but certainly does not have exact 

 historical records of exactly how many of each variety of tree 

 has been harvested out of his field over the past years . Even 

 the most accurate historical sales records would not have 

 reflected the fact that this year nearly every tree was at a 

 marketable siae and that all were ready for harvest and for sale. 

 Perhaps not all would have been dug and sold, but those that were 

 not would have been left to grow another year and been worth that 

 much more. Now the grower has lost them all. His federal 

 assistance will be very little in comparison to his loss, and, in 

 fact, may be nothing unless he can produce just the right 

 records . 



This is just one example. I could relate many other stories 

 about Christmas tree growers who had five foot trees uprooted due 

 to soil so soggy that a little wind blew them over, or about 

 growers in southeast Iowa who lost entire crops of strawberries, 

 tomatoes, peppers, and melons. 



Mr. Chairman, thank you again for giving the Iowa State 

 Horticultural Society the opportunity to testify. We know that 

 you and the members of this committee recognize the value of 

 specialty crops and appreciate all the risk and hard work that 

 goes in to their production. We hope you will consider our 

 suggestions for making disaster assistance more accessible and 

 more responsive to the needs of specialty crop producers, and 

 especially the perennial crop producers. I will be happy to 

 provide you with any additional information or try to answer any 

 questions that you may have now or in the future . 



(Attachments follow:) 



