Christmas tree farms have been closing down. A trip to Indiana, where many have vanished, revealed a variety of reasons. This is patient, solitary work.
Christmas tree farms have been closing down. A trip to Indiana, where many have vanished, revealed a variety of reasons. This is patient, solitary work.
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Where Have All the Christmas Tree Farms Gone?
By Julie BosmanPhotos by James HoskingDecember 24, 2019
Since 2012, hundreds of Christmas tree farms across the country have closed. I drove to Indiana, where the problem is especially pronounced, to ask farmers what’s going wrong.
A lot, it seems.
Many tree farmers are getting older and choosing to retire.
In Indiana, more than 40 percent of Christmas tree farms have disappeared since 2002.
The farmers who remain told me they’re a misunderstood bunch.
“It sounds cushy,” said Carrie Cusick, a 40-year-old farmer in Wanatah. “‘Oh, you only have Christmas trees?’ But it’s hard work.”
At her tranquil farm, needles from Fraser firs crunched underfoot and filled the air with a woody scent. Business has boomed this year, partly because two nearby farms shut down.
Trees alone don’t seem to be enough anymore. “You’ve got to have Santa Claus, you’ve got to have hot chocolate, you’ve got to have a hayride,” said Rick Robbins, who owns Dreamland Christmas Tree Farm in Williamsport.
But Mr. Robbins, who has been in the business for 39 years, is a purist. “I tell people, ‘I’m a tree farmer. I don’t want to entertain you.’”
The job doesn’t appeal to everybody.
Patience is essential. It usually takes at least six years before the trees that farmers plant each spring are tall enough to sell. And not all of them are pretty enough to end up in a living room.
Misshapen or spindly trees are chopped up and turned into wreaths or door swags.
Summer means time to trim. Tree farmers use sharp, long knives, trimming each tree with precise, upward sweeps of the blade.
They spend entire days out in the fields, which have neat rows of trees carefully marked by the year they will eventually be sold.
It is a task suited for solitary perfectionists.
“My husband does all the trimming himself,” said Kathy Wendt, an owner of Lost Forty Tree Farm in Greenfield.
Extreme weather in recent years —alternating droughts and floods — has made business difficult.
This year, the Wendts had so few trees to sell that they opened for a single weekend.
Plenty of people prize the ease of an artificial tree.
But farmers said they saw a lot of younger customers, especially millennials, who prefer the real thing to its plastic counterpart.
Sheets Christmas Tree Farm, in Osgood, proudly supplied the White House Christmas tree in 1968.
This season will be their last, said Kebe Sheets, the owner. The cost of equipment and labor keeps going up. The farm will stay open, but the trees will be replaced by different crops.
“I was born into this,” he said. “It’s just time to bow out. It’s time to do something different.”
Julie Bosman is a national correspondent who covers the Midwest.
Produced by Morrigan McCarthy