A Christmas tree shortage means farms could run out of trees early

Growing live Christmas trees, it turns out, isn’t so simple — more subject to the whims of supply and demand than, say, lettuce.

Pennsylvania and New Jersey tree farmers say there is a “tight supply” this season, and some farms may close earlier than usual to protect future Christmases. If you haven’t gotten a real tree yet, go now, no later than this weekend, they urged.

“There’s multiple growers that closed after Thanksgiving weekend. They sold all their trees,” said Bill Exley, of Exley’s Tree Farms, which has two locations in Gloucester County. “Thanksgiving weekend was our busiest weekend.”

The National Christmas Tree Association said supply has been tight but steady since 2016 and cautioned against panic.

“You will be able to purchase a tree,” the group insists.

Christmas tree farmers work on extremely advanced schedules — the average tree takes 10 years to mature. That means farmers today have to wonder what the market will look like in 2033, while also tending to their plants for the 2029 and 2030 crops. There’s pruning and pest control to be done — things they can somewhat control — and then there’s climate change and the occasional arctic blast.

“This past spring, just before Memorial Day, in parts of the Midwest and Pennsylvania, we had a spring freeze, a 29-degree day,” said Gary Hague, a farmer who grows and sells Christmas trees in Wyoming County and Hatfield, Montgomery County. “We were just breaking bud with new growth. I won’t be able to sell those trees.”

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when people were urged to get outside, demand went through the roof at cut-your-own farms. Last year, farmers told The Inquirer that record drought forced them to irrigate heavily, bumping up prices for consumers.

Economic forces, dating as far back as the Great Recession of the late 2000s, prompted some farms to shutter and sell, directly affecting today’s supply. Hague, who’s on the Pennsylvania Christmas Tree Growers Association’s board of directors, said there are not many younger people at the meetings. Still, Pennsylvania is one of the nation’s largest suppliers, with approximately 1,400 farms.

Culturally, the Christmas season encroaches on Thanksgiving more and more, a significant shift from decades past when trees were often sold Christmas week, even Christmas Eve. The American Christmas Tree Association, which mostly advocates for artificial tree manufacturers, said 70% of consumers display Christmas and winter decorations, including their tree, before December.

“We have some people who come before Thanksgiving,” Hague said, “and that’s too soon.”

Exley has tried to compromise, offering customers the ability to come “tag” trees they want in mid-fall, while pumpkin picking.

When asked when he might shut down cutting at his Hatfield farm, Hague said “pretty soon.” Exley said tree-cutting will likely end at his larger farm, in Monroeville, the weekend before Christmas.

Beth Ann Bossio, of Quarter Pine Tree Farm, near the West Virginia border in Fayette County, said it will take another “two or three” years for supply to catch up with demand. Bossio, also a board member of the PCTGA, said consumers who can’t make it to a farm to cut a tree can still support the industry. They could buy real trees at big box stores or supermarkets, even a chain-link lot behind a diner.

“All of them were grown at a farm,” she said. “So it all helps.”

The National Christmas Tree Association seemed a bit annoyed by all of it, saying the industry “didn’t run out of trees last year, the year before that, or any previous year, and it won’t this year either.“

“It would be erroneous to assume that just because a restaurant in your neighborhood is out of fries, other restaurants around the country must also be out of them,” the group wrote in a supply fact sheet.