Cool Springs Nursery a Premium Grower of Fraser Fir Christmas Trees has reacted to this through the roof inflation in two ways.  First we have quit using 18-46-0 and are now injecting 0-46-0 into the ground when we plant the trees at a rate of 700lbs/acre at a cost of $400 per acre this hopefully will supply all the phosphorus that the tree needs for the next 10 years.  We then use 0-0-50 at a rate of 200lbs/acre at $120 dollars an acre, this should be a one time application.  All this would be done the first year in addition to the lime application.  Having done this in the first year we would then use 46-0-0 ($700 per ton for the next 10 years at a cost of a $70 dollars per acre per year or $28,000 per year per 400 acres.

How can we cut these costs even more?  Clover can be depended on to supply 50lbs of real nitrogen each year to Fraser Fir Christmas Trees.  This is half the nitrogen requirements of a Fraser Fir.  If you use White Clover which is one of the best nitrogen fixers it costs $200 per 50lbs.  The rate is 8lbs per acre at a cost of $33/acre.  This $33 dollar per acre clover investment would yield the same amount of nitrogen as a $35/acre 46-0-0 application(half of what is needed per year for Fraser Fir Christmas Trees).  The beauty though is that this clover would continue to supply nitrogen over the next 10 years.   This would save $350 dollars of nitrogen cost over a ten year period.  For a 400 acre farm this would be a cost savings of  $140,000 on the effort to supply nitrogen to trees.

Down side to this scenario is the manual labor to sow this clover.  One worker could do 10 acres per day at a cost of $100 dollars.  The labor to do 400 acres would be $4000 dollars.  The other downside is that there is no guarantee that one will get the rain to make the clover grow after spending a total of $13,000 for white clover for 400 acres and $4000 for the labor to put it down for a total cost of $17,000.  One upside is that this clover may dramatically reduce weed control costs.  In summary this  $17,000 would theoretically save $140,000 over a ten year period  In addition if you put this $140,000 in the bank over this period it would it would grow into at least $300,000 dollars at the end of the ten year fertilization period.

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No recession in these numbers! Fraser Fir Christmas trees have sold well for us in good times, in slow downs and in recessions.  At the retail level, Fraser Firs are relatively inexpensive for what you get, generally selling for $30-80.  When you compare all the pleasure and joy that a beautifully decorated Fraser Fir brings to the cost of one tank of gas at $50 - $70 dollars, then the tree is more than worth it.  Or, compare one meal for four at Applebee’s, $40-$50,  to the cost of a nice beautiful tree at $50, which is usually enjoyed for about three weeks.  In spite of all the complaining, the cost of a Christmas tree is a fantastic deal on several fronts. (And a lifetime of memories is priceless.)

First front: the typical six-foot Fraser Fir Christmas tree is 10 years old when it is sold. We estimate that it has had over 200 procedures (including fertilizing, shearing and weed control) performed on it by the time the tree is harvested; it gets the intensive care that a Bonsai tree gets.  The price is definitely worth it.

The second reason the trees are worth it is that they have contributed so much to the environment and the consumer contributes also by buying a real tree versus an artificial one.   For ten years, the trees fight erosion, provide habitat, produce oxygen and eat up carbon dioxide and monoxides.  If the consumer did not purchase these trees, then there would not be 75 million new trees planted each year and a total of over 500 million Christmas trees, doing all this work. Farmland preservation would be endangered.  The consumer who buys a real Christmas tree is a true environmentalist and is contributing to the environment. The buyers of real Christmas trees should  get carbon credits and the consumer who buys an artificial - fake tree should have to buy carbon credits to make up for their bad environmental choice.

But back to the question, “Are Retail Sales recession proof and slow - down proof?”    I think Christmas trees are pretty much recession proof because of their low relative cost, the strength of the tradition and the fact that when recessions occur, people travel less for Christmas and stay home and make more of buying and decorating a tree. It might appear that the volume of sales of trees by the traditional garden center and local Christmas tree lots is down below the volumes sold in the 1990’s and before, and it is.  However, this number is misleading. Their volume was hurt by the “box stores” who began selling trees in a big way, with as many as  2-10,000 trees per store.  They bought lower grade trees and sold them with very little to no mark up as a way to get shoppers into their stores.  They reasoned if one could get the tree buyer in the store they would more than make up the profit one lost on the tree by selling the consumer other items.  This definitely hurt the traditional retailers of trees in a big way to the point that some garden centers do not sell trees at all, though the large majority still do. They now choose to sell the high quality premium trees and they stock much bigger sizes, up to fifteen feet, which you will not find the box stores do not carry.  Also, the quality is usually much better at a garden center store.

The second thing that hurt the real Christmas tree sales were the growing popularity of the artificial Christmas tree, produced primarily in China.  Consumers liked the trees because they were supposedly easier to put up and pre-lit; and even though they could cost up to a $1000 dollars, they figured that they would use it year after year and avoid the yearly costs of under $100.  (Note: garden centers now drill trees and have stands where tree can be put up in 30 seconds.)

What happened though was the artificial trees got better over the years, so like cars they were traded in.  These fake trees also did not last as long as advertised: their color faded, the pre-lit lights quit working and the great smell of a real Christmas tree wasn’t there.  In addition, the consumers who bought the artificial tree still had a desire to buy a real tree.  The result is that approximately 50 million people use a artificail tree every year and approximately 30 million use a real tree.  Thirty million real trees are sold as compared to approximately 10 million artificial trees (about 20% of total displayed).   Recently there has been a lot of concern raised about the lead in the artificial trees coming from China and the fact that almost 10 million s fake or artificial trees are going into landfills each year and are not biodegradable like real trees, not to mention that we are sending our money to China when we could have kept it here.

www.coolspringsnursery.com

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The environment, the outdoors for most Christmas tree growers is our office and we love it and want to take care of it just as we were created and mandated to do.  We have made great strides in recent years in caring for and being sensitive to the environment.

The first area that we have made great strides in is erosion.  Weeds in Christmas trees are a huge problem because they grow up in the trees and damage the limbs and block out the sunlight.  If not controlled they can grow up to eight feet in the case of Polk Weed(I am thinking this would be a great bio fuel because it produce massive amounts of plant material in a matter of weeks and the seeds are extremely hardy).  Ten years ago growers were using a lot of the herbicides that corn farms were using ,Semizine and Atrazine.  They would strip off all vegetation in the spring opening up the door for soil erosion and sedimentation of streams but by June the weeds in most cases had come back to life because the soil in the mountains is so organic that the herbicide was essentially bound up in the carbon in the organics and would not really penetrate the soil profile and kill the weed seed.  At this point farmers would carefully spray roundup or a much more expensive mix of herbicides(stinger, goal and vantage at a price of $20/acre) without very good results.  Every Christmas Tree Farmer knew and still knows the curse of Genesis 3:17, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.  It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.  By the sweat of your brow you will eat  your food until you return to the ground”.  How depressing!

Salvation came in 2000.  An Avery County Christmas Tree grower  had suspected and Doug Hundley a North State Extension Specialist confirmed and perfected the art of using very low rates of round up 4-8o.z. per acre.  They found that is  would not burn the foliage of Fraser Fir except during the last two weeks of May and the month of June and that weeds and grass could be controlled.  Even better it was found that clover is more resistant to roundup than weeds and grass and that it can survive this 4-8o.z. rate and infact thrive.  So in a few short years we went from living the curse with fields of bind weed and eight foot high Polk weed and the possibility of soil erosion from inappropriate herbicide use to beautiful fields of Clover that contribute up to 60lbs of real nitrogen per year to the growth of the trees.  Cool Springs Nursery ise currently cooperating on three acres of Fraser Fir and doing a very detailed(many replications) experiment with Dr. Ron Gehl, Assistant Professor at N.C. in Soil Science to see if clover can provide enough nitrogen and if not exactly how much nitrogen does a tree need.  This is extremely important in the type of economic atmosphere that we are in where 46-0-0(urea) is priced at $1000/ton.

We love our outdoor office and we are sprucing it up with very low rates of roundup which the EPA states is less toxic than table salt, in other words, if you ate a dish of table salt and a dish of roundup the table salt would kill you before the round up would.

Now we may have a very good chance at also dramatically lowering our fertilizer applications.

Do the deer and animals of the field love these developments?   You bet! If a deer is given a choice between eating a Fraser Fir Christmas Trees or eating clover which do you think he or she is going to do?  Clover is the choice all day long and we have actually seen dramatic examples of where there was extensive damage done to trees by deer but when clover and cover crops were planted that the deer damage was greatly diminished.  The field mice, birds and all other types of wildlife love the natural habitat that fills our Fraser Fir Christmas Tree Fields.

In addition to all this Cool Springs Nursery and a large number of growers practice IPM(integrated pest management) which is a technique where the farmer with a hand lens scouts fields of trees and counts insects and knows by experience and experimentation what levels of insect populations the Fraser Fir Christmas Trees  can tolerate.  When the populations reach danger levels and the predator insects are not doing their job we give the trees some medicine just like the doctor gives the patient.  But just as there is antibiotic resistance in the field of human medicine, insects develop resistance to the medicine we give the trees and so we are very careful to maintain the ecobalance that has been created.  This makes both environmental sense and economic sense.

The bottom line for Cool Springs Nursery and Christmas Tree growers is that we do not just talk about environmentalism theoretically and philosophically in the classroom or on a political campaign.  We in fact are continually outdoors looking for ways to cooperate with and enhance the environment with one of natures most beautiful trees the Fraser Fir.   We pratice envrionmentalism in the real world every day and we love it!

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