Which tree farm has the biggest fear?
Larriland Farm in Christchurch is home to some of the most beloved Christmas trees in New Zealand.
The farm has a reputation for producing the most colourful Christmas trees around the world, but its fear farm has been on the list of most hated trees ever for decades.
“It has a really big effect on people’s behaviour,” Larrillans director of marketing, Mark Williams, told news.com.au.
It is an area of the country that’s been known for its Christmas trees for generations, and the farm has had to deal with a number of factors.
We have to deal, in some ways, with people who are trying to get a holiday, who are coming to our Christmas tree farm and they want to have a look, and it is hard to get that out of their minds, he said.
When they come in, it is like they are trying for a holiday or they want a souvenir, and then the people who work here are not going to be able to get out there and buy anything that is Christmas.
This year, Larrilans had to take a decision to close.
They had some people who were quite happy with it, but they were also really scared of the people coming in and they wanted to make sure they didn’t scare anybody, so we just had to make a decision that we were going to close and that we are going to do what we need to do, said Williams.
Christmas trees in the region were already hard to come by, he added, but this year they were hard to find.
There are so many places where people are looking for Christmas trees, and we just don’t have the time to find them.
He said he thought the people that were in the fear farm would not go away, but in fact they did.
I would say it is probably about 85 per cent of people that are on the fear farms and the rest are either tourists, or people who want to see the trees, or they just want to take photographs, or just to take their kids out to see them, said Larrillians director Williams.
“I think it’s fair to say that the fear of the trees has caused quite a lot of people to turn their back on the farm.”
This is not the first time the farm had been criticised.
In 2001, a local resident called in to a police station with complaints about the fearfarm.
Larrillias director of communications, Robson O’Sullivan, told News.com the concern farm had also been the subject of an inquiry into the forestry department, which he said found the fears were “not justified”.
“We have the best forestry equipment in the world and our trees are all in the best condition and we do all of our work from the land and the trees and we are the only farm that does this,” he said in 2001.
But he added the farm was still managed by a small number of people.
A report in 2001 by the forestry inspector, which examined the farm’s operations, concluded the farm “had no environmental or community impacts”.
A forestry spokesman said they did not know what the report said.