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Louisiana's Christmas Forest: A Southern Christmas Tree Story
by Barton Bennett
Reprinted from the October 1994 issue of the American Christmas Tree Journal with permission from the National Christmas Tree Association

The Southern Christmas Tree industry is still young, having its origins in the 1960's. Based on research and promotion by state universities and their related extension services, all manner of folks from doctors and lawyers to farmers and retirees couldn't resist the temptation to plant southern Christmas Trees.

On paper, Christmas trees looked to be possibly the best return per acre from any crop grown in our region. Why, you simply planted cheap Virginia pine seedlings, kept the grass mowed, sheared them a little and four or five years later sold them for $20 a piece.

Some early forecasts projected 90% salable trees out of 1000 per acre planted. Just recently I saw a current government publication listing costs of only $300 per acre per year (real costs are four times as much).

Unfortunately, reality proved elusive for these early forecasts. Virginia Pine was marginally suited for Christmas Tree production, cultural practices were unproven and difficult and, just as most farms began to bring trees to market, the nationwide Christmas Tree glut hit.

True, some choose and cut farms did well early on. In fact, they almost did too well. Being able to sell almost anything because of the novelty of "cutting your own tree", many growers were spoiled and never able to adapt to the need for a better quality tree once increased competition arrived in the 1980's.

Our First Tree Farm

Our family got into growing Christmas Trees in much the same way others did. On paper the returns were too good to pass up, and we had some idle land - so why not?

Well, we made every mistake in the book. We planted trees on poor land too hilly for mechanized equipment and too far away from populated areas to sell choose and cut.

Like most early southern Christmas tree farms, we had no idea how we would sell our trees. When we started selling in 1982, the market was already becoming flooded. We ended up selling trees any way we could, from choose & cut to wholesale to our own retail lots in Baton Rouge. The lessons were many and hard.

So far our story is not very different from that of many other southern growers. But rather than get out of the Christmas Tree business, as most in the South did in the last 10 years, we decided instead to phase out our existing farm and create a new one from scratch.

We felt we had learned from our mistakes and could learn from other growers across the South. Starting with a blank sheet of paper, we were confident we could do it right this time.

Planning the New Farm

It always seemed that farm location, size and shape dictated the type of marketing which would be done. We decided that with our new farm, marketing, instead, would dictate the location, size and layout .

Conventional wisdom dictated that a choose and cut farm would be small and located on relatively high value land close to large populations. Large farms would be on cheap land far away from populated areas, thus requiring wholesale marketing.

But we decided we wanted a large choose and cut farm. Our marketing experience convinced us that we wanted to sell choose and cut because that was where the fun and profits were; and we wanted a farm large enough to satisfy much of the local market around Baton Rouge and large enough to support mechanization.

Our story is unique because we had a second chance. We had a second chance to create a new Christmas Tree farm and try to correct the mistakes we made on our first farm and build on the experience of other growers across the South.

Setting Priorities

We learned a couple of lessons well from our early years of growing and marketing Christmas Trees:

1. Top quality trees are mandatory
2. Marketing is at least as important as growing

We made up our minds that we were going to do it right and not cut corners. Then, if we failed at least we could take satisfaction in having given it our best shot.

So, in the mid 1980's we set our guidelines for establishing a new Christmas Tree farm:

1. Tree Quality. Selling into teeth of the 1980's tree glut had convinced us that only top quality trees would sell against the high quality trees being shipped into our area. Our first step towards producing the highest quality tree was to hire Bill Murray of Cordele, Georgia as our Christmas Tree consultant.

Director and Past President of The National Christmas Tree Association, active in research on southern Christmas Trees for over 50 years and himself a large producer of southern Christmas Trees, Bill is without doubt the leading authority on southern Christmas Tree production.

2. Location. The primary market for a choose & cut farm is within a 25 mile radius. Since we wanted to stay in the Baton Rouge area, our new farm had to be within 20-25 miles of the center of the city, and we needed to be in a clean, attractive neighborhood with good road visibility.

3. Soil Quality. In the South the best soils generally produce the best trees. In the Baton Rouge area the best soil we could hope for on a large farm would be a silty clay loam with adequate drainage.

4. Size and shape. Over 500,000 people live in the Baton Rouge area, translating into sales of about 60,000 real trees annually. We believed we could capture 10 percent to 20 percent of that market, or 6,000 to 12,000 trees per year. This would require a farm of 60 to 100 acres.

After looking for months in areas surrounding Baton Rouge, we found a nearly ideal property just 20 minutes north of downtown Baton Rouge on a major highway. The property was 82 acres in size, highly productive, flat to gently rolling farm land with a silty clay loam soil.

We thoroughly analyzed the estimated cash flow from our prospective farm on an Apple Macintosh computer, even mapping the final layout on the computer to make sure we could handle the necessary high volume of traffic.

Soils and drainage were checked on the ground with Bill Murray. Then, using our cash flow projections, we convinced our bank to make the loan and closed the sale in the summer of 1985.

Tree Production

We began immediately to implement our farm plan, clearing the few acres not already in agriculture, filling in an abandoned stock pond and building fences and access roads. With Bill Murray's continuing supervision and advice, the first field of Virginia pine was planted in January 1986.

An additional field was planted each succeeding year and a drip irrigation system was installed at the beginning of the third growing season.

Nothing was spared on site preparation and planting. Each field was thoroughly cultivated, including disking, subsoiling and bedding (to offset relatively poor internal soil drainage). We planted a select source of Virginia pine recommended by Bill Murray and sold through the Georgia Christmas Tree Association.

In addition we planted a limited number of our native Loblolly pine each year just on the hunch that, with proper care, it could make a decent long-needled alternative. We've always been interested in other species, so in our second field we planted 160 Leyland Cypress, beautiful, but at that time still unproven as a Christmas Tree.

Tractors and spray rigs were purchased along with a Murphy-Matic shearing machine and two Saje backpack shearers. All cultural activities were set up in a written annual workplan which detailed when necessary spraying, shearing, mowing, site preparation, planting, etc. would be done.

This workplan even included the types of chemicals and rates to be applied to each field. The drip irrigation system is controlled by soil tensiometers, and the amount of water each size tree receives and how often is pre-programmed and monitored.

A Most Important Decision

After we had owned Louisiana's Christmas Forest for several months we made a decision which, in hindsight, may have been the difference between success and failure. We decided that we liked the neighborhood around the farm so well that we would build a home on the farm and live there.

Why was this important? Well, the intervening years have convinced us that growing southern Christmas Trees is so exacting that the only way a southern Tree farm can be successful is if the owner(s) live on or at least near enough to the farm to allow constant oversight.

Many times on my daily afternoon walks, I've noticed problems which just couldn't wait for a weekly inspection by a non-resident manager. For example, one recent Friday I found that a large crop of Colaspis beetles had just blown in. I spent the next day personally spraying all the pines on the farm. If I hadn't caught the problem early and sprayed the next day, we might not have had pines to sell this Christmas.

Marketing

Our plans were to begin selling when the oldest trees were four years old, utilizing extensive advertising fin the firest few years. As it turned out, when the fourth Christmas arrived (1989), we didn't have the heights necessary to begin seeing in earnest. However, we wanted to get started with sales, as least to some extent, so we just opened the gates with no publicity except our highway exposure.

We were pleasantly surprised to find that, with absolutely no advertising and with severe oversupply of trees in Baton Rouge, we were able to sell 2,500 trees our first year, all choose and cut.

This success highlighted the value of good location and highway visibility. Many customers that first year told us they had been watching our trees grow for four years. They really felt a personal attachment to the trees since they had watched Louisiana's Christmas Forest take form from its beginning.

The next year we had a 30-second TV ad professionally produced and made full and expensive use of TV, radio and newspapers. We continued our capital investments, building a unique Gift Shop and a 60' by 60' metal "Tree Barn" for flocking, stands, cold drinks, coffee, etc.

Also, in an effort to further enhance the choose and cut experience, we added Prince, a pet 2,400 lb. Clydesdale draft horse. Prince also became the main feature of our logo, a Clydesdale pulling a sleigh with a Christmas tree on it.

We continued spending heavily on advertising for the next two years, and sales increased steadily through our fifth sales year (1993) when we harvested 8,400 trees, all choose and cut. And, without any effort on our part, we were flooded with calls for school tours, another excellent form of advertising.

Customer surveys indicated our best advertising was the farm's excellent road visibility, followed by referrals, newspaper, TV, school tours and other (including radio) in that order.

Source: New Customers

Road Visibility : 32%

Referrals : 29%

Newspaper : 16%

Television : 11%

School Tours : 9%

Other : 3%

Total : 100%

In 1993, we cut our advertising budget in half, eliminating TV because of its high cost and radio because of its poor performance. In 1994, we will further reduce advertising because we can now sell all we can grow.

It's interesting to note from the above chart that we are now generating 70% of all of our new customers with no advertising cost at all (road visibility, referrals and school tours).

What's New and Exciting

The 160 Leyland Cypress planted in our second field survived and grew well, encouraging us to plan 1,000 of these new trees in each of the next three years. As the Leylands grew and became more and more beautiful, we became more and more excited.

When our first Leyland Cypress were four years old and ready for sale, we were eager to see how they'd be accepted and hold up in a house. That year we put four Leylands in our home for testing and sold others to family and friends so we could get feedback on their performance.

Initial reaction was good. Everyone who cut a Leyland was satisfied; and we determined from our four test trees that, if kept in water, Leylands would outlast any tree we ever used.

In fact, we kept on up from the weekend before Thanksgiving to the middle of March before it finally dried out. Some customers tell of keeping theirs up and redecorating them for Mardi Gras or Valentine's Day.

The next Christmas we had 1,000 four-year old Leylands ready for sale with an average height of eight feet. We put up signs calling our customers' attention to "something new" and directing them to the Leyland field.

The response was gratifying. The Leylands sold quickly, and after the first two weekends, non were left.

Since this was our first year to see Leyland Cypress in quantity, we were quite interested in our customers' reactions. With the exception of one tree returned because it dried out (the customer didn't keep it in water), all response was positive. However, we didn't know just how positive until next Christmas when the people who had bought Leylands returned!

Almost without exception, they said something like "It was the best tree I ever had and I'm never buying anything else" or "It lasted for weeks after Christmas and didn't leave needles in my carpet" or "It looked as good the day I took it down as the day I cut it".

With testimonies like those, we knew we had to plant more Leylands. In 1991, we planted 3,000 and then 5,000 in each of the two years since. And, because we were planting so many Leyland Cypress each year, we began rooting out own (Leylands will only reproduce vegetatively) and selling planting stock to other Christmas Tree growers and to the public as landscape trees.

In my opinion, Leyland Cypress is superior to Virginia pine as a Christmas Tree in almost every way. It is much more attrative, matures in less time, produces more salable trees per acre and requires less maintenance. In addition, we in the South have, for the first time, a tree that can compete with any tree on the market.

The Leyland is so pretty and performs so well in the home, customers are beginning to demand it over all other species. Possibly the best part for those of us with choose and cut farms is that people have to come to our farms to get Leylands; the tree appears to need too much water and care after cutting to hold up on retail lots.

In addition to Leyland Cypress, other species are being tested on southern choose and cut farms. The Carolina Sapphire (a cultivar of Arizona cypress) is becoming quite popular in some areas. We're also working with Bill Murray to develop an improved Virginia pine through breeding and rooting of selected superior trees.

What Does the Future Hold in the South?

Southern Christmas Tree farming will always be a difficult, exacting business even with improved trees such as Leyland Cypress. The difference is now we're working with trees which can reward our efforts to an extent Virginia pine never could.

This is not the time for southern growers to get discouraged and get out of the Christmas tree business. With better species and a likely imminent end to the marketing glut, southern Christmas Tree farming is just starting to become a good business.

We firmly believe that choose and cut is the only way to go in the South. Not only it is more profitable than growing for wholesale, but we in the deep South simply don't have a good wholesale tree.

What we've done in creating a large choose and cut farm close to highly populated areas can serve as a model for other Christmas Tree farms in the South. It's worked near Baton Rouge, and it may work near other major cities.

But make no mistake about it, a large Christmas Tree farm on high priced land is a risky business. It requires high initial investment, economic and emotional staying power and total commitment to doing everything right.

Copyright 2006 Louisiana Christmas Forest
Members of the Southern Christmas Tree Association