Christmas trees selling quickly ahead of holiday season, drought raises concerns over future
SACRAMENTO — Christmas is coming early for Eli McGee and other tree farmers like Chad Ericson.
"We have a limited number of trees to sell," said McGee, who co-owns a farm in the Apple Hill area of Placerville. "So we kinda have a quota and they go fast."
"We've been swamped the last three years including this year," Ericson, who owns a tree lot in West Sacramento, explained. "And it's because people have been at home."
A business built on tradition weathered the storm of the pandemic.
"We've watched kids be raised from the time they came in as babies and now they're 10-15 years old so it's pretty cool," says Ericson.
But it now faces new challenges: wildfires on the one hand and drought on the other.
"These trees need a lot of water to survive," Ericson, who gets his trees from Oregon, said. "About four months ago, we got a big spurt of rain up there which really helped. With the economy and the wildfires and the droughts, it's gone up and down."
"We've definitely had to water more," McGee added.
McGee's farm in Placerville is local but supplies are often coming from outside the area.
"We're lucky that this farm has irrigation, but irrigation costs money and we're paying much, much more to water this field," he said. "Planting new trees has become harder. The small trees with the heat, it's hard to get them established and growing and up to a sellable size."
A persistent drought on the West Coast has led farms like McGee's to think about doing things differently.
"We do this procedure called stump culturing," explained McGee. "When we do have a tree that is at a sellable size, we don't cut it off at the ground. We leave several branches at the bottom."
Basically, they're planting a tree on an already existing root without starting from scratch — much like vineyards graft grapes onto new rootstocks.
"With that stump having an already established root system, it can better uptake the water that is there," McGee says.
That speeds up the process and helps combat the costs of droughts as demand remains sky-high.
"It helps those new trees grow faster so hopefully we can keep that supply turning over," he concludes.
Even with inflation hitting and a recession looming, the trees are still flying off the shelves.
"We've had to raise prices with water. With inflation, all that factors in so we've raised prices and I know a lot of the other tree farms have, too," McGee said.
"Not very many retail places [where] you get everyone in a great mood and out there ready to see you," McGee added with a laugh. "Everyone's always in a good mood to be outside and be picking out their Christmas tree, doing that family tradition."
The long-term issues of drought and wildfire, while in the back of everyone's minds, come second to the excitement of having a tree in your house on Christmas eve.