Reclaiming Abandoned Christmas Trees

[alefland]

Hello everyone! I am in sort of a unique position in that I work for a non-profit that cultivated and sold christmas trees in the past, but hasn't done anything with the trees in a number of years (lots of other projects like farming, firewood production, and educational programs have gotten in the way). We want to revisit our Christmas tree operation and see if it is economically viable, or if it is something we should permanently abandon.

Here is what we have:
--2-3 acres of trees, a variety of different maturities/ages, and a variety of species
--All of the trees are planted in straight rows with space to navigate a tractor through the rows
--None of the trees have been trimmed/sheared in the past 3-4 years, but we have mowed between the rows

We have generally sold our trees as cut-your-own to local residents who are familiar with our organization, but I am not sure how many we sold each year. (Again, this was just sort of dumped on me)

So I guess the big questions are:
1) Can we salvage the trees that are already planted? Or has our neglect ruined the trees?
2) Is as operation of this scale profitable? 2-3 acres seems pretty small, so we are wondering if anyone else has had an operation like this
3) If we were to get back into the business, what type of staffing are we looking at for our scale? One full time employee for the whole year? A part timer during the summer?
4) Our organization tries to make ecologically sound decisions in all of our practices, meaning that most synthetic pesticides or herbicides would be out of the question. What types of organic practices do people know about?
5) What am I missing?

Thank you!

 

[alefland]

Here are some photos of the trees I am talking about. You can clearly see that we were trimming them at one point but in recent years we have not been caring from them, and the tops are very thin.
Many of the trees on the property are a lot younger (and more easily salvaged?), a few are older and might be lost for good...

 

[Zale]

As a non profit, you will definitely not make a profit with these trees. Xmas trees is a cut throat business with a slim gross margin. Sell what you can and move on to something else. IMHO.

 

[B Harrison]

I am not sure why a non profit would do trees, unless it was just to use up land and give someone something to do, so there is a reason to not have a profit.


I don't think the pictures look too bad, best bet is to find a local tree farm and hire there guy to come work the trees, and then offer to split sales with them if they work the tree sell or sell them at a really low rate wholesale get your money out of it.

A vineyard would be a good way to dump 16-20000 a year into 3 acres for the first few years, after 6-8 you might see some money come back in, but your going to have to hire someone who knows grapes and wine.

Blue berries will do really well any place Christmas trees will and would be easier to keep up. You could then hire someone a few times a year to manage the farm and then harvest the fruit to be sold wholesale.

Just some ideas, there free for now.

 

[alefland]

I am not sure why a non profit would do trees, unless it was just to use up land and give someone something to do, so there is a reason to not have a profit.

That is essentially why we have done Christmas Trees in the past. In addition to a host of other activities, our organization works with our town to preserve open spaces and manage public land. We are not necessarily trying to make big bucks here, but definitely don't want to be losing any money while doing this. Our biggest goal is to educate the public and give them a connection to the land through the variety of activities that we do.

 

[Zale]

If you are trying to educate the public, why don't you give them the ability to "adopt" a tree. They care for it, maintain it and when the tree is ready, they cut it down. Just a thought.

 

[alefland]

So I did a pretty thorough inventory of our trees and came up with this data.

The numbers inside of each wedge corresponds to the number of actual trees we have of that height. Seems like we still have a lot of trees that are still to small to sell, and that we should care for them to protect our initial investment.