Seven years to a Fraser fir
We once tried to count North Carolina’s Christmas trees from space. This time, grow one acre of them.
North Carolina cut about 3.2 million Christmas trees in 2022, second only to Oregon, and almost all of them are Fraser fir from the high mountain counties. Every one of those trees was a cost for most of a decade before it was a sale.
Scroll one growing season at a time. The money is from NC State Extension’s budget for one acre of Fraser fir.
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What a tree farm teaches a business
A Fraser fir farm is the clearest picture there is of working capital. Every dollar of shearing, fertiliser and labour sits in the field as inventory you cannot sell yet, and the longer the cycle, the more money it holds. Nobody can make a fir grow faster.
Most businesses can shorten their cycle, though. An order that waits a week to be invoiced, stock bought a month before it is needed, a job finished but not billed: each is a smaller version of the same field, holding cash until the cycle completes. You cannot shear those weeks off a tree. You often can off an order.
The budget, as printed
| Year | Labour hours | Costs | Sales | Running net |
|---|
Source. NC State Extension, Christmas Tree Production AG-95 appendix, Table 5 (one acre of Fraser fir, 8-year rotation) and Table 7 (a 9-acre farm planting one acre a year). Dollars are shown exactly as printed. The page was last updated in August 2016 and does not state the price year; its operating costs are close to the $1,500 per acre per year reported in a 1999 NC crop profile, so they likely reflect costs from around then, and today’s would be higher. The budget does not say whether land is included or how many trees it assumes per acre, so this page does not divide it into a cost per tree. Nursery years are paid for inside the price of the transplant and are not broken out. Tree production: USDA NASS 2022 Census of Agriculture, Table 35. Growing elevations: NC State Extension, Selecting Sites for Fraser Fir. The tree drawing is illustrative, not a measured height for each year. Research files: research/fraser-fir-economics-2026-10-29. Highland Willow, 2026-10-29.
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