Michael May is the owner of Lazy Acres Farm in Chunky. Moving through a row of trees, he stops on one with frosty, blue foliage.
“This one right here is a Blue Ice Christmas tree,” May said. “It has a really nice odor to it. It's kind of a light, I would say maybe a teal blue or like an aquamarine color blue. It's a little bit different from your traditional dark green Christmas trees or even a Frazier fir. But it has a very subtle foliage and it's a very nice little tree.”
For the past two years, drought conditions have threatened the inventory that farmers like May have available. He says he has experienced significant loss as a result.
“We have one field right over there [where] we planted a thousand trees in 2023,” he said. “Over the course of the summer I lost 700 of them.”
However, May says he replanted those trees in 2024 and only lost 300 of them this year.
“I've made the decision going into 2025 we will have to put in some type of irrigation,” he said. “Never had this problem in 44 years. But I cannot risk losing my business and risk going through another drought again.”
Mike Buchart is the executive secretary with the Southern Christmas Tree Association. He says the Christmas tree industry has not been immune to extreme weather conditions.
“Last couple of years, we had a couple of killer freezes,” he said. “They were dangerously low temperatures. You couple that with extended drought conditions, you've got a situation where any plant materials having difficulty surviving as healthy as it normally would.”
However, Buchart says the industry was not primarily losing older, mature trees.
“Those typically have been the younger trees that have a much smaller root system,” he said. “We lost trees because of the frozen cellular tissue. We lost trees because of drought.”
Despite these challenges, Buchart says those looking to get locally grown trees are in luck.
“We have a good inventory out there,” he said. “These farmers do everything they can to make sure that when you go out there, you're getting the best quality product that they can produce.”
