If you haven’t yet made the annual trek to pick up a Christmas tree, brace for some sticker shock.
Prices have spiked this year, in part because of a tree shortage with roots in the 2008 recession, which is causing a national and regional shortage of Christmas trees — and higher prices for consumers. Other factors contributing to the shortage and price bumps are the five-year drought and possibly even Christmas tree farmers switching to a different kind of tree.
For several years beginning in 2007, cash-strapped families bought fewer trees, meaning Christmas tree farmers brought in less revenue and planted fewer trees. And since Christmas trees grow about a foot a year, it’s the smaller crop of recession-era trees that’s just now hitting tree lots around the South Bay.
‘Classic boom and bust’
“The shortage is real,” said Josh Fredricks, owner of Cherry Creek Tree Farm in Oregon.
Fredricks, who sells to Christmas tree lots in the South Bay, pointed to the “classic boom and bust” of the business: the economy goes down, growers lose money and then decide to leave the business.
All 50 states grow Christmas trees, but Oregon is the No. 1 Christmas tree producer. And the Beaver State is facing an especially short supply this year — and that’s affecting California and other West Coast tree sellers.
“Christmas trees take eight to 10 years to grow,” said George Jones, owner of George’s Christmas Trees in San Pedro. “You go back to 10 years from now, and that’s the recession. Ten years prior to that there was another recession.”
Recession drove out farmers
Jones said the recession was the the last straw for many tree farmers, but he’s been able to stay in the business because of his long-lasting relationships with growers over the years.
“I didn’t have that much of a difficulty finding trees, but I had to go with their (higher) prices,” he said. And of course the increases are then passed onto customers.
Some tree lot owners report that growers are charging $10 to $20 more per tree, forcing price jump of $5 to $15 at tree lots.
The lingering effects of the Great Recession aren’t the only challenge for tree farmers and sellers.
“Lately the weather has been a factor,” Jones said. “When the weather’s not like it’s always been, trees are more susceptible to disease.”
Diseases such as Current Season Needle Necrosis, which can develop when a tree doesn’t get enough moisture and a fungus causes the needles to fall off, also make things tough on growers, he said.
Janica Rye, whose Pomona tree company Christmas Conifers supplies trees to some South Bay tree lots, says the drought has been a big factor in their price increases.
“Our water bill has tripled,” Rye said. She and her family own farms in Bloomington and Nuevo in San Bernardino and Riverside counties, respectively, but also buy from farms in Oregon. Prices on the trees from Oregon have risen at least $20 each from last year, she said.
Living trees also affected
Even companies like the Living Christmas Company in Redondo Beach, which rents out potted trees that are replanted after the holidays and maintained for the next season, have had to scramble to get enough trees for their customers this season.
“I can tell you that we have had some disappointed customers because we were only able to get limited stock this season,” said Megan “Nutmeg” Davis, who has been with the company since 2009. “We were lucky that instead of getting a limited amount of trees, we had some from years past that we maintain.”
The company sold out of their blue spruces on the first day they were available online.
Supplies running out
As a supplier, Rye also had an issue getting enough trees. When she and her husband went to Oregon to put in their order this summer, she was told that the shortage probably wouldn’t affect them this year. But when it came time to deliver, growers had a hard time filling her order.
“We want 600 trees, but then they say, ‘We can only do 400, that’s all we have,’” Rye said. “What do we do? Have them replace them with sticks?”
Doug Hundley, a spokesman for the Colorado-based National Christmas Tree Association, said that if Christmas tree farmers let trees grow naturally, they’d look nothing like what families have come to expect. So farmers must put in hours of work shearing the trees every year, holding back their vertical growth so they get thick and sturdy.
The work is very labor intensive, and some people are leaving the industry for another type of tree that’s not as intense: Filbert trees, better known as hazelnut trees.
While some people have blamed the exodus of farmers leaving the Christmas tree industry for the easier-to-maintain marijuana plant, both Fredricks and Jones pointed to hazelnut as the real competitor.
“That’s one of the big crops in Oregon, a lot of people transitioned to it,” Fredricks said. “I’ve seen a lot of marijuana up there, but not necessarily Christmas tree farms. Marijuana farms aren’t 100-acre operations (like tree farms), they’re more like 10-acre operations.”
How about artificial trees?
Another serious competitor farmers have to deal with: artificial trees.
While Americans have been buying real Christmas trees for about 75 years, Hundley said, the artificial tree industry has taken off in the last 25 years or so.
While 25 million to 30 million real trees go into homes each holiday season, sales of artificial trees have risen to roughly 10 million a year. And since people use artificial trees for five or more years, Hundley said, that figure is equivalent to 50 million fewer live trees being sold.
“It’s a big deal,” he said. “They’ve come on strong.”
But, he warned, the fake trees “are going to be in landfills forever.” Real trees, on the other hand, go right back into the soil and are grown by 4,000 to 5,000 small family farms in the United States.
“This is not corporate farming,” he said.
And, Hundley said, there’s nothing like picking out and decorating a real tree to foster family memories.
This nostalgia is what tree farmers and lot owners cling to when it comes to hard times.
Jones says he tries his best to give his customers a more personal service, like cutting trees to order, flocking and offering delivery, to keep them from going to big-box stores or going artificial.
“It beats the heck out of buying one from a shipping container from China,” he said.