Tree Growers Expect Merrier Season

Thursel Roatcap and her husband, Ralph, would rather not get much rest this weekend.

As owners of the Santa Paula Christmas Tree Farm, the couple would be thrilled to spend a couple of long, hard days selling trees to families filled with holiday spirit.

The Roatcaps have been irrigating, pruning, fertilizing, watching for disease and otherwise tending this year’s crop of cut-your-own Monterey pines since they planted them five years ago. They have promoted the holiday season since October with advertisements, mailers and a healthy dose of word of mouth.

Now all that’s left is to wait for the customers.

“There are four days where we sell about 75% of our trees. It’s the first two weekends in December,” said Thursel Roatcap, whose 20-acre farm is home to 20,000 trees, about 5,000 of which are ready for market this year. The remainder are continuing to mature.

Last year, Roatcap said, the customers came out in good number. This year she expects to continue that success. And she’s not alone in her positive forecast.

Others among the dozen growers who make up the county’s $400,000 annual pine tree industry are also optimistic. But it’s a cautious optimism--after all, the Christmas tree business has experienced tough sledding the last five or six years.

From the late 1980s to the early 1990s, an overabundance of Monterey pines throughout California lowered the market price of the trees, said Mike Wade, executive director of the California Tree Growers organization in Merced.

“There was a great surge in the mid-1980s of farmers getting into Christmas trees,” Wade said. “Then as the trees matured and reached the market there was a saturation, which made for quite a depression in prices. Marginal farms were forced out of business because they couldn’t make it in the face of stiffer competition.”

At the same time, he said, cheaper-to-produce Douglas firs, imported from the Northwest and selling at lower prices than the pines, also cut into the state and local Monterey pine business. Wade said up to 3 million of the imported trees make their way to the California market each Christmas season, to compete with just 500,000 Monterey pines.

“Some farms closed over the last five or six years. We stuck it out,” Roatcap said. “The market began to ease in 1994. That’s when our sales went up.” To hedge their bets, the Roatcaps also own a 25-acre farm in Frazier Park in Kern County that specializes in fir trees: white firs, noble firs and silver-tip firs. Douglas firs tend to be bushier than other firs and pines.

In contrast to the Roatcaps, who have been selling Christmas trees for 26 years, John Hagle is a relative newcomer to the business.

Hagle planted the first crop at his 11-acre Hagle Tree Farm in Somis back in 1988, and began selling in 1992. In three Christmas seasons to date, Hagle has seen a steady increase in business. He credits part of that to pricing his trees lower than those of his competitors the first couple of years.

Hagle has since upped his price to $3.50 per foot, about the same as the rest of the local Christmas pines, but he still anticipates a happy holiday.

“It looks like it’s going to be a fine season,” said Hagle, who has 4,000 of his 16,000 trees ready for market. “The weather just needs to cool down. People don’t like coming by in hot weather.”

Like Hagle, other local growers are concerned about the unpredictable weather. They can spend countless hours caring for a tree throughout its life cycle, replanting new trees as older ones sell, and marketing their product. But if the weather isn’t right when it comes time to sell, the customers don’t come out, they said. And that can be particularly risky in such a short sales season.

“It’s very critical to have a good season,” said Hagle, who said it costs him $10 to $12 to grow each tree. “It’s fun to do, but if it doesn’t do well, you don’t continue doing it.”

At Tierra Rejada Ranch in Moorpark, the six acres of Monterey pines are the center of attention each December. This year, nearly 3,500 trees--two acres’ worth--are ready to sell. Ranch Manager Rick Brecunier said it’s too early to determine what kind of season the ranch will have, but, as usual, much will depend on the weather.

“It’s hard to get into the Christmas spirit in 80- or 90-degree weather with the wind blowing really hard, and rain makes it real difficult too,” he said. “There have been situations in the past where we’ve had to close for a few days because it was too muddy.”

Brecunier said a bad Christmas season would be noticeable but not devastating at Tierra Rejada, where citrus, avocados, blackberries, vegetables, strawberries and pumpkins take up most of the 175-acre property at given times of the year.

“The seasons are basically over for the other crops, so Christmas trees are the main thing,” he said. “We’d notice a bad season, but it’s not a large percentage of the overall operation. But then, every little bit helps in farming. It’s part of our diversification.”