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Which State Leads the Nation in Christmas Tree Production? [1]

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Date: 2024-12-13

Editor’s Note: This is the inaugural edition of our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s geographer and data reporter. Subscribe here to get a bi-weekly map, graph, or other data feature straight to your inbox.



Now that Thanksgiving is behind us, we can stop wasting our time arguing about whether it’s acceptable to decorate for Christmas before Turkey Day (it is) and move on to more serious business, like which state sells the greatest quantity of America’s most important crop, Christmas trees.

The weekend before Thanksgiving my partner Hannah-Marie and I drove to a Christmas tree farm in our little North Carolina mountain town. We hiked to the top of a hill overlooking a brown barn, tied a ribbon to the top of the tree we wanted, and hollered for a 12-year-old with a chainsaw – presumably the farmer’s son – to cut it down and drag it to a tractor.

During the holidays I pride myself on living in Christmas tree country. I love watching cars with out of state plates drive up the mountain and leave with Christmas trees tied to the top. Not only is it festive, but it reminds me that people love visiting this beautiful area that I now get to call home. It amplifies my gratitude.

I was born just south of the North Carolina border in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, and everyone I knew traveled out of the foothills and into the mountains to pick out their trees. I had never heard of the trees coming from anywhere else.

Because of this, it is with great resentment and gnashing of teeth that I declare Oregon the nation’s prime producer of Christmas trees. That’s what the USDA’s Census of Agriculture says, and I can’t argue with the data.

Why can’t the South have anything good? Just kidding. We have Waffle House.

The USDA’s Census of Agriculture, which is conducted every five years, collects data on land use, farm ownership, income, crop sales, and inventory, among other things. It started in 1840 as a way for government agencies and researchers to study American agriculture.

In 2022, the most recent year of available data, Oregon sold $161.3 million in Christmas trees, accounting for 34% of all sales nationwide.

Oregon is home to approximately 48,400 acres of Christmas tree farms, primarily located in the western part of the state along the I-5 corridor, which starts north of Seattle, Washington, and ends in Southern California.

North Carolina is the nation’s second largest producer of Christmas trees. In 2022, North Carolina’s Christmas tree sales totaled $119.6 million, making up a quarter of nationwide sales. North Carolina’s tree farms are concentrated in the western part of the state, where the higher elevation of the Blue Ridge Mountain range makes for ideal growing conditions for these cold-loving trees.

North Carolina and Oregon together made up 60% of the nation’s Christmas tree sales in 2022.

Michigan is the third largest Christmas tree producer in the nation, meanwhile, having sold $45 million in Christmas trees in 2022. Michigan produces Christmas trees on roughly 33,100 acres of land scattered all over the state, from the icy remote corners of the northern Lower Peninsula, to the rural towns in the south.

Washington state, the fourth largest producer of Christmas trees, had $35 million in tree sales in 2022. Like Oregon, most of Washington’s tree farms are concentrated along the I-5 corridor in the western part of the state.

But sales are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the economic and environmental benefits of these festive crops. Cut-your-own Christmas tree farms are part of a growing agritourism movement in rural communities, according to the USDA. Data from the Census of Agriculture showed that agritourism revenue tripled between 2002 and 2017.

“Cut-your-own-tree farms provide a source of seasonal tourism, bringing extra dollars to the community when people stop for lunch or visit other businesses,” said National Christmas Tree Association spokesperson Jill Sidebottom in an interview for a newsletter called Solutions Effect.

After Hannah-Marie and I strapped our tree to the top of our car, we drove to the nearest Mexican restaurant in nearby Spruce Pine, North Carolina, a small town known for its quartz mining. We weren’t the only ones with that idea. In the parking lot were at least three other cars with Christmas trees and wreaths tied to their racks.

And because Christmas trees are often grown on rocky or steep terrain that does not support other crops, their production helps preserve land for agricultural use, according to Sidebottom.

“People can make money off of their land instead of selling it for vacation homes being built,” she said.

Note: You might have noticed that we’re not using our normal county-level rural classification system for this analysis. That’s because the Census of Agriculture data at the county scale isn’t reliable or consistently reported. We’ve resorted to using state-level data, which is more reliable, because most Christmas tree farms are located in nonmetropolitan, or rural, counties.



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