But Growers’ Profits Dip : Christmas Trees Bring In the Green
Dave Evans’ hands were numb because he had been at the controls of the helicopter for hours. Leaning out to see the ground below, he hovered as the next load of Christmas trees was snapped on to the line dangling from the chopper.
The blast of air from his rotor beat the earth as he pulled the bundle of trees into the sky, turned, and churned toward the waiting truck. Evans had been doing this hour after hour, day after day, as the Christmas season approached. He flew in the rain, and he flew in the cold. Mud caked the inside of the chopper. The Christmas tree harvest does not wait on the weather, and the weather had truly been bad.
“This is the nicest day we’ve had,” said Evans, as fog rolled in and the near-freezing temperature dropped by the minute. But there was still an hour or so of daylight left, time enough to haul out another 1,800 trees--25 or so to the bundle--for Holiday Tree Farms, one of the big players in the billion-dollar business of Christmas tree growing. So Evans went back for more.
Giants of the Industry
From his aerial perch, he could see thousands of Christmas trees, in a state where there are millions--5 million alone on Holiday’s 3,000 acres. In Oregon, an estimated 6.5-million trees will be harvested for Christmas, a figure matched only by Michigan, the other giant in the Christmas tree industry.
Only a few growers count their trees by the millions or use helicopters for harvesting. But when the nation’s Christmas tree crop is tallied this year, it should come to more than 34 million conifers cut for the holidays. They will be grown on 12,000 farms, from the likes of Holiday Farms and larger to mom-and-pop operations, in all 50 states.
And the figure for harvested trees doesn’t count the stolen ones. In some places, such as the forests of Utah, thieves often take thousands at a time for sale in Nevada and Southern California. To prevent thefts, growers in Hutchinson, Kan., spray the evergreens they don’t intend to cut each year with a solution that smells like rotten eggs if the trees are brought indoors.
Glut on the Market
Even without the black market variety, Christmas trees have become too abundant on the market, largely because the number of small-time operators have increased at a time when artificial trees have been gaining in popularity.
Those two factors have cut into the profits of the traditional suppliers, who once had only to wait for the phone to ring to fill their orders. Now they face the double assault of artificial trees and farms that have sprung up in places where there once was little or no local competition.
Texas farmers, for instance, are predicting they will sell 650,000 trees this season, 150,000 more than two years ago. In balmy Florida, membership in the state’s Christmas tree growers’ association has jumped from 23 members to almost 300 in the last eight years. Even Hawaii has a fledgling Christmas tree industry.
“We don’t like to talk about the glut,” said Hal Schudel, the founder of Holiday Farms, which will harvest just under 500,000 trees this year. “We say that we have a plentiful supply.” But, a few minutes later, he put it more succinctly: “Everybody and his dog has gotten into it.”
It is the artificial tree that really gives the growers fits, especially since it is sometimes difficult to tell artificial from real these days. Now, 34% of the nation’s households have artificial trees, while 38% buy live cut trees each year and 28% buy no tree at all.
This year, the National Christmas Tree Assn., in a move that bespeaks its concern, is spending $1 million on an advertising campaign extolling the virtues of a live tree--scent, beauty, family tradition, etc.--with Willard Scott, the rotund, homey TV weatherman plugging for the organization.
Schudel slipped his pickup truck into first gear and rolled slowly down the dirt road of one of his tree farms and on to the asphalt highway. Just as he did, another semi-trailer truck laden with Christmas trees emerged from the mist and passed in the other direction, headed south.
Hundreds of these trucks had been pulling out since the first part of November, the start of the cutting season in the Pacific Northwest. Schudel once figured that if all the trucks carrying Oregon Christmas trees were bumper to bumper, they would stretch the 100 miles from Portland to Eugene. Here in early December, as many as 40 trucks carrying 30,000 trees were leaving Schudel’s three processing areas each day. And before that, the farms had sent trees to the East Coast in refrigerated rail cars.
The trees had been measured and trimmed and baled in twine. They had been loaded on trucks that pulled into the staging areas. When the ground was muddy, as it often is, migrant workers spread hay to keep the trees clean.
“Nobody likes a muddy tree,” said Schudel.
Checks on Customers
When all of the cutting and shipping is over, by the middle of December, Schudel and one of his three sons will fly south to California, the company’s major market, to make sure their customers are satisfied. Just the cost of transporting the trees will be more than $1 million.
“It’s a far cry from when we’d get them out of the woods,” said Schudel. “Intensified forestry, I call it.”
The evergreen has long been a symbol of power. Primitive man believed evergreens had godlike qualities, and they were used for winter solstice ceremonies aimed at ensuring the protection of family and food sources. But it was the Germans who popularized the Christmas tree as we know it.
According to the “Christmas Tree Book,” by Phillip V. Snyder, the oldest mention of a decorated tree was in a 1605 travel diary of a visitor to Strasbourg. Over the years, the Christmas tree has taken on some unusual looks. For a time in Austria and Germany, the evergreen was hung upside down from the ceiling. Others were hung--tip up--from the rafters, with an apple attached to a sharpened tree butt.
Slow to Catch On
The Germans brought their Christmas tree tradition to the New World, but--given the strong influence of Puritanism over the earliest settlers--it was hardly quick to catch on. As late as 1840, decorated trees were so scarce that entrepreneurs were selling tickets for the public to view them.
The first person to see that there was real money to be made in Christmas trees was a New Yorker named Mark Carr. Carr, who lived in the Catskills, filled two ox sleds with young firs and spruces, loaded them on a steamboat and brought them the 80 miles to New York City in 1851. He sold them at a tidy profit and that fact was not lost on others. By 1880, more than 200,000 trees were being shipped to New York each year.
In Chicago, a pair of brothers named Schuenemann became part of the city’s lore when they were the first to lash Michigan trees to the deck of their fishing schooner, sail across Lake Michigan and sell them at the Clark Street Bridge in 1887.
It is said that a New Jersey farmer named W. V. McGalliard was the first to grow Christmas trees as a crop, doing so at the turn of the century. And Franklin D. Roosevelt helped popularize growing Christmas trees by planting them on his Hyde Park estate in the 1930s.
Landmark Year
But it was not until 1954, when Congress created special tax incentives, that Christmas tree farming began to evolve into a big business. That also happened to be a time when there was a shortage of trees.
“That is when the artificial tree got its toehold,” said Dave Baumann, associate executive director of the National Christmas Tree Assn., somewhat ruefully.
Hal Schudel began his tiny operation at about that time because he needed something to supplement his summer income in the landscape business. At first, he cut trees from the wild. But climbing up and down the Oregon hills was more than he had bargained for, so he and a partner began growing their own trees near the sawmill town of Kings Valley.
Thirty-two years later, Schudel and his sons are still at it, but in a much bigger way. They will take off from work during part of January, but then the cycle will begin anew. There will be thousands of seedlings to plant in the spring, and each of the millions of trees on the farm, which grow about a foot a year, must be pruned by hand to give them that coveted conical shape. There will be experiments in the nursery as the search for the perfect tree goes on.
And then it will once again be time for the harvest, and, if profits continue to decline, perhaps there will be fewer growers. Congress took away the tax breaks for Christmas tree growers in the 1986 tax overhaul, making it no longer as attractive an investment. But Schudel will be there, because Christmas trees are his life. They are how his sons feed their families.
Schudel was watching yet another truck being loaded, this one headed for Los Angeles. No, he wouldn’t do anything differently, except some little things. If he had it to do over, last year he would have cut more trees, but that’s about all.
“It’s been a good business,” he said. “I don’t have any complaints.”
