"The Lodge" at Ring Family Farms contains a gift shop and holiday decor.
The rest just enjoy picking a pre-cut tree and reveling in the holiday cheer. He estimates only about 25% of their visitors want "to do the whole Clark Griswold thing" by cutting their own trees. People don't seem to mind much, Phil says. The trees are propped up in tree stands and arranged to resemble a natural "forest" of trees. The couple still works hard to give their customers a "cut-your-own" experience on their seven-acre spread. If we were starting this year as our first year, he wouldn't have been able to supply us with any." "Thank goodness our vendor is really good to us," Phil says. The proprietors of Ring Family Farm, west of Thompson, North Dakota, have been at it just four years, but have seen the business take off much more quickly than the trees they planted could.Īs the Rings wait for their own trees to mature, they rely on pre-cut trees from South Carolina. Phil and Brittany Ring are much newer to the tree-farming game. "Those days right after Thanksgiving when you see the kids running around and having fun, it brings a tear to your eye," he says.Ī petting zoo is another feature on the farm.Ĭontributed / Ring Family Farms. Regardless of what Hallmark movies try to tell us, tree farming isn't all gingerbread and tinsel. I'm not making any money on it and I've got to hire help for it," he says. "A lot of people don't realize how much I'm spending out of pocket. The dry, hot summer that followed made matters worse.Īs a result, Cupkie says he will have to scale back on some of the pricier features of his winter wonderland, like the live reindeer rental, which costs $10,000 per season. An unseasonably warm May encouraged early new growth, which was then literally nipped in the bud by frost right before Memorial Day weekend. As it can take 12-13 years for the average evergreen to become a stately holiday fixture, that explains the nationwide dearth of trees today, Cupkie says.Īnother factor has been the unpredictable whims of Mother Nature: Of the 6,500 new seedlings Cupkie planted this year, he predicts just 3,500 will survive. In 2008, after the economy crashed, many tree farmers planted fewer trees, he says. With 20 years of managing a 43-acre, 35,000-tree farm under his belt, Cupkie has a long-range perspective on the tree shortage. "But when I have choose-and-cut customers, I have to limit the number of trees I harvest, because if a choose-and-cut customer pulls in and my land is bare, I have a problem." "How it affects me is that the phone is already ringing off the hook, with people wanting trees because their normal supplier can't get them," he says. That makes tree farmers like Cupkie nervous, as he scrambles to fill demand for an anticipated 2,100 retail and wholesale trees this year. In response, more people than ever may look to tree farms for their Fraser fir this year. Pandemic aftereffects have managed to logjam access to Tannenbaums via supply bottlenecks, labor shortages and inflation.
Real tree sales jumped in 2020, as the pandemic-weary masses gravitated toward the nostalgia, beauty and fragrance of f resh-cut firs, pines and spruces.īut as COVID giveth, it also taketh away.
Like nearly everything else, COVID changed things. Between 75 and 80% of Americans who have a Christmas tree now have an artificial one, and the $1 billion market for fake fir grows by about 4% per year-despite them being reusable, according to the NCTA. Even so, real tree sales have toppled in the past decade as more Americans buy artificial trees, according to the Denver Post.
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