NEWS

Hard work harvesting Fraser firs for holidays

Dale Neal
Asheville
  • North Carolina ranks second in the nation, supplying more than 4 million trees.
  • Ashe and Alleghany counties have the most farms.
  • Each season, the Buchanan family business will harvest some 40,000 to 50,000 trees for the wholesale market.

BAKERSVILLE – The Thanksgiving turkey's not even been purchased before a host of evergreen trees start heading down from the hills, to be trucked across the Southeast and up the East Coast.

Rodney Buchanan's crew has been cutting and baling fragrant Fraser firs since mid-November, no matter what the weather. Coming into the holiday season, farmers across the mountains finally see the payoff from years of raising trees on the high slopes.

North Carolina ranks second in the nation, supplying more than 4 million trees to what's a $1 billion annual market in the U.S. alone.

Last week, the Bakersville bank thermometer read 12 degrees when Buchanan rode through blowing snow on his way to work outside the Clarissa community.

"Yesterday was more miserable," Buchanan said, hunkered in a hooded sweatshirt, heavy jacket and insulated pants. "It was raining and about 40 degrees, but we put rain suits on the guys and cut about 300 trees."

Today was baling day. The men in their green slickers dragged the shaggy trees from yesterday out of the snowy field to the roaring diesel baler. They are hired Hispanics, legally documented workers who work apples and produce at other seasons. Come November, they drive up from Hendersonville to the High Country.

Rodney's uncle, Burl Buchanan, 74, manned the cable that pulls the trees through the large ring where the tree branches are tightly bound with green plastic twine. The trees will be stacked like green crayons standing in the back of a truck that will be bound from Bakersville to retail lots in New York.

They would bale about 150 trees in the blowing snow before calling it quits for the day.

Each season, the Buchanan family business will harvest some 40,000 to 50,000 trees for the wholesale market — "the mom and pop tree outlets, Boy Scouts, church groups and others." Buchanan said.

But Buck's Tree Farm isn't an especially large grower. "We're too big to be considered small and too small to be considered big," Buchanan said.

Larger growers can deliver 200,000 trees, supplying the big box retailers like Walmart, Lowe's, Home Depot and others.

Finding a new cash crop

The Buchanan family, like most smaller growers across WNC's fir-rich farm fields, has been in business for decades.

Ride up through the high country of Mitchell, Yancey and especially Avery counties, rows of trees climb former pastures on hillsides. Ashe and Alleghany counties have the most farms, while North Carolina has about 1,370 farms and just over 40,000 acres in production, according to the 2012 agricultural census.

"My dad saw that tobacco wasn't going to be around forever, so we tried some Christmas trees in the mid-'80s," Buchanan said.

In the old days, farmers went up Roan Mountain in search of "wildlings" — the small seedlings of the Frasers that coated the 6,285-foot-high peak that rises from Bakersville.

"This is where the Christmas tree industry was born," Buchanan said, here under Roan Mountain where European explorers first discovered and named the Fraser fir 200 years ago.

Andre Micheaux, the French botanist who discovered and named the rhododendron on Roan Mountain in his plant-collecting explorations in the 1780s, probably spied the distinctive evergreen in his travels. But his lesser-known partner and rival Scottish botanist John Fraser gave the species its name.

The two explorers roamed the mountains following in the footsteps of John Bartram. "Apparently Fraser talked too much for Michaux, and when Michaux's horse ran off, he told Fraser to go on ahead without him. As a consequence, John Fraser took the high road and discovered the Fraser fir," Jill Sidebottom, an N.C. State agricultural scientist, wrote in a history of the state Christmas tree industry

Two hundred years later, the bushy Frasers with their long-lasting needles have become the perfect Christmas tree for many customers.

A growing market

Oregon leads the nation in Christmas tree production with Douglas fir and spruce, but since the 1960s, North Carolina farmers learned to capitalize on the Fraser fir.

Instead of hunting "wildlings," Buchanan orders seedlings sprouted and nurtured in Oregon before planting them in the fields. He has to invest around seven years of careful pruning, spraying with low doses of herbicides and pesticides and plenty of attention before the trees reach their perfect proportions, ready for market.

Like any agricultural commodity, tree prices are dictated by the market.

The Great Recession really didn't affect Christmas tree sales, said Jennifer Greene, executive director of the North Carolina Christmas Tree Association, headquartered in Boone. "For most people, Christmas is about a real tree and they weren't going to cut back on that. They might have downsized from 8 or 9 feet to 6 or 7 feet."

Tree farmers have been harder-hit in recent years by an oversupply of Frasers, which depressed tree prices. The market is just now recovering, Greene said.

"Just the rumor of an oversupply dropped prices by about 10 percent," Buchanan said.

Starting in 2015, tree farmers are counting on the Christmas tree checkoff program to take effect, Buchanan said. Growers will pay 15 cents a tree to help their industry market and promote their product.

The measure has been caught up in politics and billed as "a tree tax" by some, but Buchanan said industry wants the fees to help promote and market live trees versus artificial.

"It's not about competition between individual growers," Buchanan said. "We're really competing against artificial trees."

The work is hard and cold on a blustery day outside of Bakersville. Burl Buchanan doesn't mind hard work, but he admits "a warm bed feels awful good on a day like today."

They'll keep cutting through the first week of December. Buchanan will check in with his dealers in January to see how their seasonal sales went and to take the orders for next year. "We'll do some repairs, and relax for a couple of weeks. Maybe go down to the beach for fishing."

They'll be back in the fields by March, starting to prune and treat the trees as the annual cycle begins again.

While the bulk of his business is in wholesale, Buchanan does open his fields to families who come to cut their own Christmas tree each holiday season. "I like to see those kids exhaust themselves running around the field," he said. "The parents put the tree on top of the car and you see the kids asleep in the backseat as they drive off."

The work is hard, but the rewards are more than monetary.

"You're growing a product that kids will get up on Christmas morning and find their toys under that tree," Buchanan said. "That makes the whole year of work worth it right there."

Christmas trees by the numbers

How many trees do WNC counties grow?

Ashe: 359 farms, 13,188 acres in product, 1.9 million trees cut in 2012

Alleghany: 128 farms, 9,767 acres, 893,505 trees cut,

Avery: 317 farms, 7,343 acres, 759,838 trees harvested

Watauga: 125 farms, 3,132 acres, 248,473 trees cut

Jackson: 73 farms, 2,417 acres, 201,009 trees cut

Mitchell: 71 farms, 1,011 acres, 57,896 trees cut

Macon: 34 farms, 147 acres, 8,113 trees cut

Madison: 32 farms, 253 acres, 15,315 trees cut

Yancey: 32 farms, 176 acres, 5,018 trees cut

Haywood: 19 farms, 180 acres, 9,944 trees cut

SOURCE: USDA 2012 Census of Agriculture

"