Christmas trees are no get-rich-quick crop

By Jamie Smith Hopkins Baltimore Sun

The moment Fred and Kimberly Clark have waited for since planting firs, pines and other evergreens eight years ago finally arrived 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 back-yard 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 easy as it looked to Fred Clark years ago when he stopped by a Christmas tree farm and watched a farmer accept customers' cash.

"I thought, 'I can sit on the back of my truck and collect money, too,' " joked Clark, 49, whose day job is as 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. Some newcomers buy farms from retiring growers. And some — like the Clarks' Evergreen Knoll Christmas Tree Farm in Huntingtown, Md. — occasionally start up.

Last year, superstorm Sandy walloped Pinetum Christmas Trees in Maryland, where Cindy Stacy and her 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.

"We only get one paycheck a year because we're tree farmers, so last year was sad," Cindy Stacy said. "We lost 70 percent of our income."

They didn't have insurance. Insure a tree at the start of its life, and you'll pay many times its retail value by the time you're ready to cut, Marshall Stacy said.

But the Stacys, now semiretired and collecting Social Security, survived and this season was much better.

When the Stacys bought their 370-acre property in 1970, it was already a tree farm — albeit a bankrupt one. The Clarks, by contrast, started from scratch on grassy back yards.

Every year the Clarks plant 200 trees. They have 800 to 1,000 growing now, after heavy losses in the early years.

Kimberly Clark, 42, a federal worker, said interacting with the customers appeals to her more than the farming part. But she can see her husband likes the labor.