The moment Fred and Kimberly Clark have waited for since planting firs, pines and other evergreens eight years ago finally arrived earlier this month.
Their first Christmas tree sales.
All farming is delayed gratification, but the delay is particularly long for Christmas tree growers. The Clarks, who run two backyard farms in Calvert County, Md., have done a lot of planting and shearing since 2005 in hopes of an eventual payoff.
It’s not as simple as it looked to Fred Clark years ago when he stopped by a Christmas tree farm and watched a farmer in a truck accept customers’ cash.
“I thought, ‘I can sit on the back of my truck and collect money, too,’” joked Clark, 49, who also is a ductwork contractor. “It turned out to be a little more work than that.”
The number of Christmas tree farms has fallen in recent years and could continue to shrink. But some newcomers buy farms from retiring growers. And entirely new operations - like the Clarks’ Evergreen Knoll Christmas Tree Farm in Huntingtown, Md. - occasionally start up.
Maryland once had many more such farms because federal tax laws made them a favorable investment for lawyers and other professionals with money, said Cindy Stacy, co-owner of Pinetum Christmas Trees in Garrett County, Md. A major tax break disappeared in 1986. The side investment farms went away.
Now, “we’ve got the diehard people that are in it for the long run,” Stacy said.
The biggest Christmas tree operation in Maryland is Jarrettsville Nurseries, which has at least 150,000 trees in various stages of growth at its two Harford County farms. Boyd Saulsbury and cousin Gary Thomas are the second generation of the family to run it.
The men and Saulsbury’s wife, Dana, sell trees directly to customers every day during the holiday season, weeks so busy that they temporarily bulk up to 40 or 45 employees. Families go to the farm to sit around a campfire, take a hayride, cut down the trees they want - “We supply saws,” Saulsbury said - plus see Santa and Mrs. Claus on weekends. The family’s living-room-size trees cost from $42 to $63.
They sell wholesale to garden centers, fire departments and others purveyors, too. They’re even raising trees in North Carolina these days.
But Saulsbury says they face the roll-of-the-dice odds of any farming operation, multiplied by the extended growing period. Drought kills trees. So does too much rain. And disease. And deer.
He said you’ll end up harvesting two-thirds of what you plant - if you’re lucky. Poor weather on weekends leading up to Christmas is bad for sales.
It’s not usually quite that bad, but the risk of a truly awful year always hovers. Sometimes it hits.
Last year, superstorm Sandy walloped Pinetum, where Cindy Stacy and husband Marshall have farmed for 43 years. They lost thousands of trees to high winds and heavy snow - trees that became 200 tractor-trailer loads of mulch.
It was all the more heartbreaking for the Stacys because the storm felled varieties grown much longer than usual - nearly half a century, in one case - for hotels and other customers who want trees 20, 30 and 40 feet tall. The biggest, most beautiful specimens sell for $6,200 each.
“We only get one paycheck a year because we’re tree farmers, so last year was sad,” Cindy Stacy said. “We lost 70percent of our income.”
When the Stacys bought their 370-acre property in 1970, it was already a tree farm - albeit a bankrupt one. The Clarks, all told, have about a half-acre of trees growing behind their previous home, which they now rent out. About the same number of trees grow behind their current home, a nearby property with more room for expansion because it’s just under 10 acres.
Every year the Clarks plant 200 trees. They have 800 to 1,000 growing now, after heavy losses in the early years.
The Clarks had 50 or so trees that are at least 7 feet tall, living-room suitable, at their original farm in Huntingtown. Kimberly Clark suspects they won’t sell them all this month, though. She wasn’t certain they’d be ready to open and thus got a late start on marketing.
But that’s where it helps to be a farmer of Christmas trees, rather than something with a shorter life cycle. Whatever the Clarks don’t sell before Christmas will keep growing. They can get out the shears and try again next year.
“That’ll be fine,” Fred Clark said. “They’ll be a little bit taller.”
Business, Pages 72 on 12/22/2013