Growing live Christmas trees, it turns out, isn’t so simple — more subject to the whims of supply and demand than, say, lettuce. Pennsylvania and New Jersey tree farmers say there is a “tight supply” this season, and some farms may close earlier than usual to protect future Christmases. If you haven’t gotten a real tree yet, go now, no later than this weekend, they urged.

... Christmas tree farmers work on extremely advanced schedules — the average tree takes 10 years to mature. That means farmers today have to wonder what the market will look like in 2033, while also tending to their plants for the 2029 and 2030 crops. There’s pruning and pest control to be done — things they can somewhat control — and then there’s climate change and the occasional arctic blast.

... “This past spring, just before Memorial Day, in parts of the Midwest and Pennsylvania, we had a spring freeze, a 29-degree day,” said Gary Hague, a farmer who grows and sells Christmas trees in Wyoming County and Hatfield, Montgomery County. “We were just breaking bud with new growth. I won’t be able to sell those trees.”

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when people were urged to get outside, demand went through the roof at cut-your-own farms. Last year, farmers told The Inquirer that record drought forced them to irrigate heavily, bumping up prices for consumers.
Economic forces, dating as far back as the Great Recession of the late 2000s, prompted some farms to shutter and sell, directly affecting today’s supply. Hague, who’s on the Pennsylvania Christmas Tree Growers Association’s board of directors, said there are not many younger people at the meetings. Still, Pennsylvania is one of the nation’s largest suppliers, with approximately 1,400 farms.