YULE GO BROKE
Christmas tree shortage sends fir flying over cost
NOT EVERY business is bursting with inventory this holiday season — take, fir instance, Christmas tree farms.
Tree sellers around the country are jacking up prices on spruces and firs due to a shortage that has its roots in the Great Recession that began in 2008. Nine years ago, tree sales were down so much that growers didn’t have space to plant new ones, according to Doug Hundley, a spokesman for the National Christmas Tree Association.
Since it takes eight to nine years to grow a Christmas tree, the effects of 2008 are just starting to be felt this holiday season.
“There was a slowdown in planting 10 years ago, and that’s what’s leading to this,” Doug Hundley told the San Francisco Gate website. “It’s not the (Western) fires, it’s not the weather, it’s just the planting rhythm of this crop is very long and we can’t grow them very fast.”
New York is not expected to feel the pinch as acutely as other places, but the shortage is hurting some sellers.
Scott Leckner, 61, the manager of SOHO Trees in Manhattan, said he’s worried about running out of holiday timber before Christmas for the first time in 36 years. He gets trees harvested from North Carolina, Tennessee, Nova Scotia and Quebec and predicted the needling crisis years ago.
“We knew that attaining good trees would be a problem,” Leckner said. “We hoarded as many of our better growers as possible. We tried to store up like Noah’s Ark, because we knew the rain was coming, so to speak.”
Tree prices were slashed during the recession to sell the product, and many growers went bankrupt and found more profitable uses for their land, he said.
Farmers are now four years away from catching up to the growing cycle, he added.
And the lack of inventory is cutting into his profits.
Around six or seven years ago, he paid $24 wholesale for a 4-foot tree. That same tree now goes for $60, but Leckner only increased his prices by 10%.
“We realize that no matter what we do we ... cannot contain enough trees to service our customers. Even if we keep trucks flowing in, which we’re trying to, the growers are running out,” he said. “They don’t have enough.”
Windswept Farm owner Adam Park, 61, has also observed weather and generational changes during the 28 years he’s been in the business. But he said he’s going strong at his eight locations in northern Brooklyn, where he sells trees grown in Vermont. More than a shortage of trees, he’s happily seen a glut of buyers.
“We started selling yesterday,” he said Tuesday, “and it’s been wild, we can’t keep up.”
Despite the national shortage, there likely will be a Christmas miracle from New York’s farms, which have branched out in recent years, officials said. Farmers around the state currently have 300,000 to 400,000 trees available on 20,000 acres, and they say they haven’t seen a shortage.
Kurt Emmerich, who owns Emmerich Tree Farm in Warwick, Orange County, said the state’s tree farms are usually family-run.
“Most of them are usually on their own land, they’re not renting, they tend to be smaller, more family-oriented, more stable,” he said. “A lot of them are next generation that they’re no longer doing dairy, they’re gonna switch and diversify. So the profile of the New York grower is quite different.”
“We don’t depend on the market as much as our own destiny — we’re farmers,” he said.