A good year for Christmas trees

Christmas tree farmers around the county have spent all year preparing — and bracing — for the next few weekends.

“In our first two weekends of December, it’s just nonstop here,” said Neil Schill, who owns Glenwood Tree Farm near Brush Prairie.

Heidi Farrell at Farrell Farms opened the day after Thanksgiving.

“We’re just getting new cedar chips around the fire, making sure all the wood’s stacked for the fire,” she said prior to Thanksgiving.

Loran Larwick at Larwick’s Christmas Trees said, “I think everybody’s going to have a good year this year that’s selling trees.”

Last year was a bit of a down year for fresh Christmas trees in Clark County, but Larwick and other local Christmas tree farmers said they expect a busy year.

There might be fewer corner lots with baled, pre-cut trees, Larwick said, as the market for wholesale trees has declined slightly.

“It’s like a commodity,” he said. “There’s fewer trees out there; there’s still the same demand.”

Tree-selling retail stores and tree stand businesses depend more on the larger tree market, he said. Fewer trees are currently on the market after a glut in trees over the past few years. That reduction in supply has increased the price of trees on the wholesale market.

“For a lot of them, they’re twice as expensive as they were last year,” Larwick said. “Matter of fact, we’re getting calls, people asking if we’ve got trees to sell, or if we know anybody that does. … We needed some extra trees this year, so I was hunting around a (Pacific) Northwest Christmas Tree Association trade show and they were all sold out.”

A surplus of trees about four or five years ago strained some farmers, Schill said, but everyone he has talked to feels like they’re coming out of it.

“Things picked up for us last year, probably, 10 or 15 percent,” he said. “If we can get back another 10 or 15 percent this year, it’d be perfect.”

Washington ranked fourth in Christmas trees harvested in 2013, at 2.3 million trees cut from 23,000 acres of farms and 250 growers, according to the Pacific Northwest Christmas Tree Association. Oregon led the nation with 6.4 million trees cut.

The National Christmas Tree Association’s data show people bought 26.3 million farm-grown Christmas trees in the United States last year.

‘Agritainment’

Local tree farmers will sell trees wholesale on occasion, but the greater share of farms in Clark County are family U-cut operation.

Wholesale farmers might move more trees — 85 percent of trees sold nationwide in 2014 were pre-cut — but the plurality of shoppers, about a quarter to a third, have still picked up their trees at choose-and-harvest farms for five of the last eight years, according to the National Christmas Tree Association.

“The farm itself has been, really for a number of years, the dominant location where people buy Christmas trees in the U.S.,” said Rick Dungey, executive director at the National Christmas Tree Association.

“People go out to the farm, they’re looking for a specific type of experience,” he said.

It’s “agritainment,” on par with U-pick apples or berries, he said.

“Lots of different crops in agriculture have figured out people want to come out to the farm, pick their own and have that kind of experience.”

Whether more customers will opt for artificial trees is always a worry. The ratio has generally held at about twice as many real trees sold as artificial ones, he said.

“I call them plastic, tree-shaped decorations,” he said, not afraid to be impolitic about it.

Dungey said the industry at large is planning for a good season as well.

“Most of what we’re hearing is very positive,” Dungey said. “We’re hearing good things, but that would be a very unscientific, purely anecdotal kind of thing.”

Tree sales can fluctuate substantially, and the national tree association’s data are based on a consumer survey, not point-of-sale counts, Dungey said, making some determinations hard to make.

Weather impacts

Dungey said changes in seasonal weather patterns, such as this year’s hot weather and drought conditions, can harm seedlings. They can slow the growth of older trees, but generally don’t affect trees grown as Christmas trees, and the drought did not significantly affect this year’s crop.

When trees are mature enough to harvest, they’re generally ready to cut and sell, he said. What’s going to be harvested this year has already been ready and healthy for some time.

Weather’s biggest impact comes on the wholesale end, he said, when trees are trucked from larger farms to other self-service farms or pop-up tree stands.

“Most of the places where you farm trees are agricultural areas, they’re rural areas, so if you get a big snowstorm, it can really impact when you get harvest crews to your trees and your trees out of your field,” he said.

Schill plants his trees as seedlings, and he saw ample die-off this year due to the weather.

“I’d say I lost probably 40 to 50 percent of my little seedlings,” he said, and a surprising number of his two-year-old seedlings as well.

Larwick didn’t notice much difference with his trees this year, but heard about plenty other farmers in Oregon dealing with browning needles.

Weather also factors in to customer behavior.

“Too rainy and stormy, people don’t want to venture out as much,” Farrell said. “And I don’t blame them.”

However things go, the farmers said many of the customers at local farms seem to be drawn by tradition and loyalty.

“We get all our regular customers back, plus we get new customers every year,” Larwick said.

In the 1980s, years before he owned the farm, Schill would come to Glenwood Tree Farm for his Christmas trees.

“I’ve had some customers, well, they’ve been coming here longer than I’ve had the farm,” he said. “Some of them tear up when thy come in. It’s surprising how many people come up and give me a hug.”